Rule America?

Just thinking out loud. In "Rule America?" Jonathan Last lays a substantial portion of the failure of the British Empire at the feet of liberal elite's unwillingness to buy into patriotism and draws a parallel to contemporary America. There is something to his argument, but I think a comparison of the "patriotic" attitude of the average Brit to that of today's average American would also be useful. I'm not at all familiar (in a scholarly way) with British history and wonder if the ideology of British Empire was thought to be as transferrable as today's "average" American (whatever that means) thinks the ideology of Democracy is. In contrast, it seems that there eventually was no motivation for promulgating and propogating the British Empire other than for its own sake. Isn't there some difference between being patriotic about a hierarchical, top down, colonizing "empire" (the British) and being patriotic about a nation that is "imperial" in it's belief in the spread of democracy? I suppose there are some similarities in that each believe(d) that their form of government was superior. Anyway, there's a lot to chew on!