Madeleine Albright was not yet two years old when Nazi Germany invaded her native Czechoslovakia. Forced to flee to England with her parents, she watched as Adolf Hitler’s bombers rained terror on the streets of London. From a Jewish family, she later learned that three of her grandparents had been killed in the Holocaust.

Albright’s new book, Fascism: A Warning, begins by tying this highly personal experience to democracy’s current malaise. Albright argues that the historical examples of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy illustrate the danger of democracy’s gradual erosion, ultimately leading to dictatorship, war, and chaos.

The former secretary of state is impatient with complacency about the health of US institutions. The risk she highlights most centrally is that, as in past European history, liberals and conservatives will fail to respond to a buildup of attacks on the rule of law. But what her anti-Trump polemic tends to overlook are the dangers that lie outside the Oval Office.