As quoted by F.A. Hayek in his 1956 Preface to The Road to Serfdom, De Tocqueville described the process of government enslaving a people in servitude:

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 be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd.

As we lament the cultural decline in our country, this strikes me as another dimension of our decline, as we now approvingly look on the government as our shepherd.  Do we not reject the good shepherd, while exchanging the truth of God for a lie, and worshiping and serving the creature rather than the creator?