From Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal:

The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that the new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.

Now where might we be seeing that today?