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You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent" collectively somehow.
The nation is an imagined tribe... not a one of these social intuitions actually worked in theory or practice once the modern nation state came about and actively started hacking people's communal instincts to start regulating people, not at the level of the village or town of the hundreds or thousands, but at the tens of millions strong nation... this is why the birth of modern bureaucracy was so horrific and killed so many tens of millions of people, people kept behaving and acting as if they were part of a social organ capable of sane joint decision making when they weren't.
Every cultural group and nation went insane in its own unique ways in the socio-cultural drift, and the only reason civilization didn't break down entirely in SOME places is because they had a unified culture that just so happened to ape the mad vision they imagined they were enacting.
There is no 300 million strong category of "the governed" that is somehow capable of making decisions and "consenting"... Your brain is simply hacked by tribal instincts that worked and produced effective social morality when your ancestors were navigating social relations of a few thousand.
"The system" and "the Governed" and "the consent of the governed" can go haywire and murder 10s of millions of people at a moment's notice for no reason at all outside of pure cultural inertia and no sane intuition or person would at all be capable of stopping it.
You are adrift on black seas of infinity, lost in a unstoppable collective dream that could turn to a nightmare at a second's notice for reasons barely intelligible to the dream itself, with figures and institutions appearing before you in the poorly stitched skinsuits of your friends and loved ones saying "Come give grandmother a hug" or "If it isn't my old comrade. Let me shake your hand" and for the moment they hug back or shake the hand, and encourage you to follow them further up the road, and you say "Of course I'll follow they're my dear friends and family" whilst everyone who's noticed the nightmarish miasma. and that the ground is not wet with mist but blood, is screaming "FOR GOD'S SAKE LOOK AT THEIR TEETH!"
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"progressives and the wider left" argue all the time that the government must follow the consent of the governed. They just disagree with you, and for that matter with me as well, about what sort of things the governed are allegedly consenting to.
America has plenty of authoritarians, but it has no large political block that is openly authoritarian or even particularly self-aware about being authoritarian. Both the blue tribe and the red tribe view themselves in much the same way: "we are the real democrats, the heroic and plucky underdogs, the other side are authoritarians who are oppressing and victimizing us".
Which is not surprising, both sides grew up watching the same movies about heroic and plucky underdogs who overcome oppression and victimization.
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I'm neither progressive nor part of the wider left, and your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome. As for "from the consent of the governed", yes, I learned this in school as well. It appears among other places in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". But it's a fiction. Nobody "consented" except through tortured versions of consent ("if you don't move to an ungoverned place you've consented the government you're living under). And this "consent" cannot be withdrawn without punishment (as Jefferson, of course, knew). Government's powers are by and large not "just" at all.
Hobbes doesn't help, he just provides another tortured version of consent. Either the sovereign keeps you out of a state of nature in which case you should, by all means, consent because a state of nature is worse than anything the sovereign would do to you. Or if you don't consent, you're in a state of nature, in which case whatever the sovereign does to you is fine because that's what a state of nature is. So Hobbes's conception boils down to "might makes right", with some apologia about how it is right to bow down to might because only that might can keep you from the state of nature.
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