Today that idea has a quaint, nostalgic charm since no serious person would now contend that our government requires anything resembling consent from its people.  It rules imperiously an intellectually lobotomized public it has rendered torpid, quiescent, inanimate.  You are now told what it has done or is doing, if you are told anything at all.
 

While the stupefied, comatose condition of Americans that allows them to opt out of the moral universe and assuage their guilt with petitions, donations, and memberships in faineant feel-good drum circles is not necessarily permanent, an awakening is most unlikely since all forces that could break that trance are devoted to maintaining it.
 

Government, which Plato, Burke and the Federalist argue  will always work to aggrandize itself against all restraint, has triumphed over the people who theoretically empower it, but Government is only a device, a giant toy, a Rube Goldberg machine, and the wholly-owned subsidiary of Capitalism, and the dirty, tattered cover for its absolute rule.  With apologies to Clausewitz, American government is the continuation of Capitalism by other means.