I would phrase it differently: democratic elections everywhere tend to be won by promising free stuff, and even the US is not immune to this tendency.
During the first 140 years of democratic elections in the US, the average voter got approximately zero free stuff. E.g., when the Dust Bowl made 100s of 1000s of families completely destitute, they received no substantial assistance from (state or Federal) governments: the free stuff started flowing a couple of years after that when FDR took office.
BTW the US economy was already 3 times the size of the next largest economy (the UK) at the start of the Dust Bowl.
One reason the democratic disease of free stuff took so long to manifest in the US is that the disease is largely incompatible with the central principle of the US theory of governance, namely, to maximize freedom for the average person.
Another reason is that life was easier for the average person in the US than it was almost anywhere else in the world. E.g., there were no invasions by Mongols, Teutonic Knights, Tatars, Turks, Finns, Swedes or Napoleonic armies that severely interfered with millions of lives as was the case in Russia. (Native Americans never posed a comparable military threat to European settlers. E.g., they never took and held a settler city or even a settler town that I know of.)