Sarah Vowell with a policy agenda. How Democracies Die, if it were funny.

Rome did it. Britain did it. America has done it once already and (check the news) is cheerfully lining up for a second attempt. History's experiments in self-government keep tearing themselves apart through the same grim sequence, executed at every step by the same people making the same moves that supposedly made complete sense at the time. This book walks you through the violent collapse of all three. Then it refuses to let you conclude it has to keep happening.

We started with one question: why does this keep happening? A decade and one very long hangover later, we have returned with an answer, a blueprint, and a permanent grudge against the prisoner's dilemma.

You'll meet the Roman senators who killed the Republic trying to save it. The king who had a rather terminal disagreement with his parliament. Thirteen colonies that agreed on absolutely nothing except who they were against — which, it turns out, is not a governing philosophy. You'll watch the same machine grind through three thousand years and three continents with the mechanical predictability of a toddler approaching a wall socket.

By the halfway point, you may be convinced it's hopeless. Keep reading anyway. Because we can stop history from repeating itself, but only if we accept why it always does. The back half takes at least that part seriously: it quits diagnosing and starts building. Ranked-choice voting. Multi-member districts. An end to the imperial presidency. A constitutional system engineered to keep working when operated by the absolute worst people you can imagine. Which is convenient, because those are almost certainly the people who'll be operating it.

Every claim is built to be checked.

Part stand-up comedy set, part repair manual for an aging republic, part group therapy for anyone who has ever watched a government shutdown and thought: surely this is not the best we can do.

It isn't. So pour yourself a drink. The convention is now in session.