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This is both different from Opt-out's initial proposition (that democracy was only compatible with Anglo/European cultures) and doesn't seem to match empirical evidence either. The UK is a multi-ethnic democracy and has been since the 19th century (arguably earlier, though its democratic credentials were more contestable before 19th century reforms). The US has had a more or less continuous infusion of ethnic and religious minorities for its entire existence (many of whom remain both unassimilated and uncontroversial, e.g. the enormous number of Catholics who failed to convert to the dominant religion in the US). Patronage relationships between voters and politicians is a problem in Latin American democracies, but this does not follow ethnic or religious lines. Hell, India is ridiculously multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and its rapid economic growth continues apace.
This line of thinking seems to be taking the US' relatively unusual system with respect to durable anti-black racism and concluding that it is a) a universal feature of democracy, rather than a particular problem with a large block of American voters being hostile to African-American civil rights b) an existential problem for democracy.
Nonsense. The UK had been effectively genetically unified for a thousand years, we didn't have any meaningful numbers of non-native-ethnics in the UK until the second half of the 20th century and they didn't have meaningful political representation until the 70s. If by multi-ethnic you mean Scottish and Irish then you have to deal with the fact that they are more similar to the English than to any other group of people by genetic distance, far more so than eg the average Portuguese to the average Spaniard. There is nothing in English history that even approximates the current position of having 10% of the population coming from different continents.
Ethnicity is not a function of genetics. Balkan slavs (e.g. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) have a high degree of genetic proximity and yet would generally take exception to the proposition that they are basically one people.
Unless we're positing some kind of psycho-genetic resonance, genetic proximity of the English, Scots, and Welsh is irrelevant to the hypothesis. The important thing is that they regard themselves and each other as being distinct peoples.
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