This is not to say that the coercive part goes away. You might think, quite reasonably, that since coercion is always hovering in the background, the consent part is a bit of a joke: if you don't consent, you get coerced, meaning the consent is not all that consensual. At the level of the isolated individual, this is true. But if you think about it at a collective level, the consent part is much more evident. If every single person refused to consent, the state's coercive power would almost certainly be insufficient. The stability of the liberal democratic state as an institutional complex depends on the often tacit, sometimes explicit endorsement of its citizenry. Modern state power is constituted by a complicated, shifting, and contingent combination of coercion on the part of the state and consent on the part of the population.

[...] it is not only the state that can coerce. Private economic power rarely lacks some coercive aspect. [...] Banks can push through laws in their interest because the can use their market power to disrupt the whole economy--to coerce the government to meet their demands. [...]

The combination of coercion and consent (operated by both capital and the state) produces a relation known as "hegemony," a term first elaborated in this sense by a justly famous pre-World War II Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci. [...]

Gramsci worked out his idea of hegemony while he was reading the work of Lenin [...] capital's hegemony, its power to shape the "common sense" we tacitly share about the state, the ruling classes, and their power: that those relations are natural, that they serve a necessary function, that they are the only way to keep the peace. Those in power construct an effective hegemony when the existing order appears to be not only in their interests, but in everyone's interest. It is the practices that render a given social formation ideologically "normal".