Including me. It is easy for a Brit outsider like yours truly to by cynical about the more absurd aspects of America (including the po-faced pledging nonsense you mention), and yes, there's plenty of corruption, and always has been. But to paraphrase Charles Laughton's character in Spartacus, I'll take a little republican corruption, but I won't take dictatorship. A free, democratic, prosperous America is in everyone's interests, and I for one will rue and mourn the day it becomes a theocratic dictatorship.

On a related note, here's a shameless plug for my dystopian romantic satire novel Peaceful Quiet Lives which is set in a the two nation states that emerge after a Second US Civil War.