You've cited The Readers Digest Condensed version of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook43pdf.pdf) [PDF, 96 pages, with a nice little comic book style pamphlet at the end for the really text-phobic]

This is indeed where the situation stands. You can hear it in the political discussions everywhere, including in this very forum. People have a misguided religious faith in the power of collective coercion to achieve "unity" and "consensus." It is a fool's errand. Freedom escapes them entirely. They want a LEADER.

"What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace -- the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take -- his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach witn Follies girls. It is a democratic invention.

Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands -- or, as Nietzsche puts it, too cold for his spine."
— H.L. Mencken, The Disease of Democracy (http://www.ditext.com/mencken/democracy.html)