In announcing this past week that he would be voting for Kamala Harris in this fall’s presidential election, retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig denounced Donald Trump as a threat to the very existence of American democracy. As George Orwell wrote in another era, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Luttig certainly passed that test with flying colors, but another thing that makes his statement so notable is that he is a conservative legal scholar who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush. Luttig also worked in the Reagan White House and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero in conservative legal circles, which gives added weight to his remarks.

“In the presidential election of 2024,” Luttig wrote in a statement obtained by CNN, “there is only one political party and one candidate for the presidency that can claim the mantle of defender and protector of American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. As a result, I will unhesitatingly vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States” — this despite being, in all likelihood, opposed to most of her policies.

This is heartening to be sure, although we suspect Luttig will be a lonely voice crying in the Republican wilderness. But another part of the statement also grabbed our attention. The judge declared that because of Trump’s repeated, knowingly false claims that he won the 2020 election, millions of Americans have lost faith in electoral integrity. And, “many Americans — especially young Americans, tragically — have even begun to question whether constitutional democracy is the best form of self-government for America,” he wrote.

We are more than willing to blame Trump for many things, but Americans’ declining faith in democracy runs deeper than the self-serving falsehoods spread by one man. The fact is that across a broad range of issues — reproductive rights, gun control, immigration, health care, the environment, the role of money in politics — our democracy is failing to deliver the results favored by a majority of Americans. This thwarting of the majority will predates the Trump era, and perhaps helps explain some of his right-wing populist appeal.

What disillusioned Americans experience instead is a democracy held hostage by right-wing ideologues and politicians defending the privileges of the past from the inroads of an increasingly diverse, multicultural population. The main beneficiaries of that effort constitute the wealthiest — and most powerful — segment of society, whose interests are quite different from those of ordinary citizens, though they pretend otherwise.

To understand how this came about it is necessary to revisit American history. In the beginning was the Constitution, the drafters of which feared that the great threat to the democracy they were creating was the tyranny of the majority. So they included measures to protect minority rights such as an independent judiciary and a Bill of Rights guaranteeing certain basic liberties. Those still stand Americans in good stead.

But as Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in a recent book, some other provisions are problematic as America evolves into a multicultural society. For example, the electoral college system allows candidates to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. The U.S. Senate confers outsized political influence on smaller, less populated states. The filibuster enshrined in Senate rules requires a supermajority of 60 votes to pass most legislation. Partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures of U.S. House districts often results in noncompetitive races and the election of representatives who have no incentive to enact popular measures. Judges with lifetime tenure are able to freeze in place attitudes and policies that the public has left far behind. Those who have grasped these levers of power have been able to create what the professors call in their book title the “Tyranny of the Minority.”

Certainly defeating Trump is job one. He is increasingly unhinged and has never been more dangerous, especially now that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted presidents immunity even for extra-legal “official acts.” But if the Democrats do manage to prevail, they can’t rest on that threat avoided. Instead they need to look at the bigger picture: What changes in the system are required to more effectively implement majority will and therefore boost both faith in and support for democratic norms and institutions? This is not the project of four years or eight years, but of many years of sustained effort to overhaul a system that badly needs modernizing.