Within minutes after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, 2016, a Federalist Society leader tweeted, “If Scalia has actually passed away, The Senate must refuse to confirm any justices in 2016, and leave the nomination to the next President” (p. 145). Within a day, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell announced there would be no hearings on any Barack Obama nominee. This is a prime example of partisan flouting of a long-standing norm. Old democracies die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt assert, when elected officials and political parties become highly polarized, break tacit norms of democratic governance, and refuse to enforce democratic guardrails. This time the Republican Party blocked Obama and soon confirmed a right-wing Supreme Court justice nominated by President Donald Trump. The argument: proliferation of such breakdowns presages an end to democracy, even when the formality of elections is retained.

The book is replete with such examples; it explains their sources largely in the political polarization and breakdown of guardrails by political elites. It is a fine study as far as it goes. Clearly, addiction to norm breaking has taken a huge toll on the ethos of democracy. The book should be read closely; its examples must be pondered, and its comparisons between countries are important. Nonetheless, it does not reach far beyond a political science study of electoral politics to probe deeper sources of the contemporary threat to America. Consider a few pertinent issues.

First, I did not find reference to the high probability that Donald Trump conspired with Russia—a hostile foreign country—to turn the election in his favor. If true, that would be the most extreme “norm breaking” of all, amounting to treason; it would result in impeachment, unless the Republican Party broke yet another norm and failed to act. It does not suffice to say that the juridical evidence was not settled when the book was in production. Political analysts must weigh the evidence and consequences of such a dark attack on democracy. Well before this book appeared, some of us said in print that Trump collusion “was highly probable,” reviewing available evidence at the time.

Second, while representational politics and free, competitive elections are absolutely critical to democracy, they do not suffice. Another essential side of democracy involves social movements by activists who press the state, corporations, churches, localities, bureaucracies, and universities to act upon grievances and suffering below the radar of public normality and electoral politics. Numerous things the authors now support—open voting laws, racial equality, gay rights, women’s rights, religious diversity, and action to respond to rapid climate change—were pressed first by vibrant social movements that challenged the embedded norms, disciplines, interests, and vigilante violence that had blocked them. Parties and political elites wheeled in later. That means that norm protection and revision cannot be trusted to elections, elites, and political parties alone. There is too little appreciation in this book of the vital role of social movements, hence insufficient respect for the bifocal character of democracy itself.

This omission is doubly important today, since Trumpites, if they were to succeed in quashing the Mueller probe and the last vestiges of Republican integrity, would soon move dramatically to block social movements on the left. When Trump roars every day that CNN and MSNBC report “fake news”—stealing the phrase from those concerned about evidence-free Facebook implants—he also signals the desire to take more repressive steps, if the opportunity arises. Note Kompromat, and the surveillance glasses worn by police in China today. Indeed, several of Trump’s Big Lies against others provide tells about his own ambitions. Take the charges of “fake news,” a “rigged election,” and a “deep state” for starters.

Third, no citations appear in the Index to either neoliberalism or capitalism. That is unfortunate. For decades now, the dispersed white working and lower middle class has been caught in a bind between the neoliberal wealth/income-concentration machine and noble movements by the pluralizing Left. Its wages have stagnated; it has suffered underwater mortgages due to neoliberal collapses and harsh bankruptcy laws; it is hard-pressed to send its kids to college in an economy organized around higher education; its public schools have declined; its labor unions are weakened by neoliberal courts; and it has felt closed out of affirmative action. And on and on. If you define the white working class through the cluster category of relative income level, wealth, education level, lifetime earning prospects, inheritance, retirement assets, access to health care, and the ability to make ends meet within a neoliberal infrastructure of consumption, it is clear that a time bomb has been waiting to explode. Some of us have warned about this for years. It is important to say that other constituencies have been doing even worse. But the white working class, too, is a minority in need of attention.

Unless and until social movements and the Democratic Party attend to this constituency, things will be precarious. Yes, the racism and misogyny in sectors of it must be adamantly opposed, but as Trump’s ugly incitements reveal, a large segment must be drawn into any dynamic movement to promote pluralism, democracy, and egalitarianism if these goals are to progress. This, too, is a neglected minority.

Fourth, after voicing suspicion that courting the white working class would mean discounting other minorities, the authors do note a few “universalist” policies to reach across constituencies. Social Security, Medicare, and a minimum wage are included. Good. But that list needs enlargement to include real job security, protection against corporate authoritarianism, legislation to strengthen labor unions, free public college tuition, better retirement prospects, and fair bankruptcy laws, just for starters. Reverend William Barber, Cornel West, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are fomenting such cross-minority movements.

Fifth, the authors say that democracies often die slowly. Yes they do. However, we now face rapid aspirational drives toward fascism: drives to create the deep state Trump purports to expose, to intimidate the media, to entrench white triumphalism, to merge with Fox News, to suppress poor and minority voters, to weaken labor unions, to flood courts with right-wing judges, to whip up anti-immigration frenzy, to test public tolerances of new cruelties, to collude with urban police, to encourage vigilantism, and to use real or fake security threats to intensify the base. Things are moving fast. Seeing it this way, we must ask ourselves what to do if Trump either closes down an inquiry that is boxing him in or a Republican Congress refuses to impeach and convict if evidence of conspiring with Russia to sabotage an election becomes overwhelming.

We are living through an attempt to assassinate democracy. I certainly do not say that things must necessarily break that way. Other possibilities are real, though they probably involve public mobilization on several fronts. However, the authors do not advise what to do if or when things take such a sinister turn. My own sense is that if they do concerned citizens need to foment a nonviolent, general strike: withdrawing from work, minimizing consumption for its duration, flooding town halls, taking to the streets, and lobbying institutional leaders intensely. I hope it does not come to that.

So I disagree with Levitsky and Ziblatt in some ways. I also appreciate their attention to the norms or ethos of democracy. I trust that across these differences, we will be aligned to resist efforts to assassinate democracy.