The U.S. Constitution includes robust civil-liberties protections, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But these protections are not unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, majorities — if they’re large enough — can, in fact, do nearly anything they want, even in established democracies. It’s only really a question of how high the majoritarian bar is. In the United States, two-thirds of Congress and 75 percent of the states can amend or repeal articles of the Constitution. They could theoretically pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, where alcohol is currently legal and relatively easy to find, the issue of alcohol consumption is a touchstone for endless “what if” hypothesizing. Yet, Prohibition happened not in any of those countries but in America, with large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives as well as 46 of 48 states backing the 18th Amendment (of course, banning alcohol in the U.S. wasn’t justified on primarily scriptural grounds, while in Muslim-majority countries, prohibition is seen as fulfilling an explicitly Quranic directive).

In other words, built-in constraints and constitutional “guarantees” aren’t enough on their own to preclude illiberal outcomes. What Americans really depend on, then, is a shared political culture and the ideas and ideals that undergird it. As James Fallows notes, “Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms — on the assumption that you’ll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends.” But all it apparently takes is one man with charisma and an unusually perceptive understanding of the human psyche to change that. There are norms against politicians suggesting that minorities should have special identification cards. There are norms against saying you want to kill the families of terrorists. There are norms against encouraging your supporters to use violence against their political opponents. It’s not entirely clear why you don’t do or say these things (because Trump clearly has), but you just don’t. The very fact that Trump has made such frightening comments on national television — without any corresponding “disqualification” or decline in popular support — has already undermined these longstanding norms.

The United States has had demagogues before, but they rarely make for viable presidential candidates. This is democracy’s blessing as well as its curse: that people you really don’t like — people who you think might threaten the Republic — can actually win. In the specific context of the Republican nomination, Trump opponents basically called for prioritizing good outcomes over democratic ones. They continued to search for possible paths to denying Trump the nomination, despite the fact that, barring acts of God, he was certain to win the popular vote and a plurality of delegates in the primaries.

Even if Trump reached the magic number of 1,237 delegates, which would normally settle the matter, there were those who still seemed intent on scouring the rulebooks, parliamentary procedure, and delegate details in the hope of averting disaster. Democratic norms, the thinking goes, are great in normal contexts, but sometimes the stakes are simply too high to let democratic outcomes stand. As the columnist Walter Shapiro wrote, “[W]ith the threat of the first takeover of a modern political party by an authoritarian who traffics in racism and exudes contempt for the First Amendment … [t]here would be nothing anti-democratic about GOP leaders using every mechanism in their power to stop Trump.” Nate Silver pointed out that “technically [Republicans would] be able to deny Trump the nomination even if he had a delegate majority by changing the rules at the last minute.” They could still theoretically do something like this, even after Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana. The Republican Party is not a country, and the party can disregard the preferences of primary voters if it so chooses, but elite pacts and back-room negotiations would seem decidedly antiquated during an unusually populist moment in American politics.

“ [T]here will no doubt be a temptation to defy or otherwise undermine a democratically elected Trump.”

This particular debate in some ways mirrors arguments over the tensions between democracy and liberalism, a debate that will only intensify if Trump gains ground on Hillary Clinton in the coming months. It is probably time to err on the side of imagination, since party elites and pundits failed to imagine the unthinkable once already. What if Trump actually wins the presidency? How would we as Americans deal with an outcome that at least some of us see as a potential danger to our Constitution as well as our livelihoods?