Liberty means freedom from the power of the State. America's founders grappled mightily with the paradox of assigning the State to preserve freedom form an overly-powerful State.
From Magnet's excellent Liberty—If You Can Keep It - Yes, it does demand eternal vigilance:
Reflecting on his American travels, which he hoped would help him better understand the democratic wave he saw sweeping Europe, Tocqueville noticed the buds of a more troubling tyranny—not an intellectual oppression but a gentle though genuine political oppression—that threatens all democratic nations and that later really did come to full flower not just in the European Union but—though much less flamboyantly—even in America. Democratic governments, Tocqueville theorized, have a tendency toward paternalism, which would be untroubling if “its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing”—as with my Soviet acquaintance’s sexual revolution. Such a government, writes Tocqueville, in his most-quoted passage, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better but a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Such “gentle . . . servitude,” Tocqueville feared, could easily coexist with “the outward forms of freedom” and arise even “under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”
Prophetic words, for in fact, America lives under that gentle servitude and has done for decades, without really noticing and without understanding how it happened. Woodrow Wilson, believing that the Founders’ checks and balances merely gummed up the efficiency of government, set out to replace their Constitution and the “nonsense [they] talked about the inalienable rights of the individual” with a “living constitution,” reshaped daily “with boldness and a touch of audacity” by “judicial interpretations” that would be ever “more liberal, not to say more lax.”
