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The authoritarian playbook only succeeds if the people fail to recognize that the government’s survival depends on the consent of the governed.

These included such ideas as the fundamental equality of all human beings, the view that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and the existence of those “certain unalienable rights” mentioned in the U.S.

All of the procedure, the Constitution, everything really has to always go back to be checked against the idea that our government has the consent of the governed, that we are actually the sovereign.

Although these different thinkers reach very different political conclusions, they are all—even Hobbes—operating within a fundamentally democratic paradigm: Governments are justified by some kind of appeal to the consent of the governed; the state of nature is the key philosophical tool for establishing how people reason through their rights and obligations to each other.

Note “We the People” in the preamble to the Constitution, legitimate governments “deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed” in the Declaration of Independence and “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in the Gettysburg Address.