Our charter of government is stuck. The last time the U.S. Constitution was revised was over 30 years ago, when the “fluky” and largely inconsequential Twenty-Seventh Amendment stole into the text two centuries after it was written. The last time Congress proposed an amendment was almost 50 years ago, when the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment was sent to its demise at the ratification stage. Although state constitutions remain far more dynamic, they too have experienced a declining rate of amendment in recent years.

The functional unamendability of the Constitution is both a symptom and source of democratic decline. It is a symptom because rising levels of polarization and alienation reduce Americans’ capacity to engage in collective self-governance. It is a source because unamendability locks in structural features that facilitate minoritarian rule, congressional dysfunction, and an imperial Supreme Court. We are caught in a wicked paradox. The more outdated the Constitution becomes, the more difficult it becomes to update the Constitution.

Article V is part of the problem. Comparative scholars broadly agree that its double-supermajoritarian amendment rule is one of the hardest to satisfy, if not the hardest to satisfy, of any constitution worldwide. But Article V cannot bear all the blame, as scholars have further found that the stringency of a constitution’s amendment rule is only moderately correlated with its actual rate of revision. The prevailing “amendment culture” may be just as important as the formal criteria.

Making the U.S. Constitution amendable again, then, is likely to require a legal mechanism that does not depend on two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate, along with a cultural shift that makes constitutional reform seem more natural and desirable to more people. As it turns out, there is a potential solution to both requirements sitting in plain sight: the never-used provision of Article V that allows state legislatures to “call a convention for proposing amendments.” The most straightforward way to reinvigorate ordinary Americans’ relationship to their fundamental law would be to call such a convention.

The idea is less radical than it may seem. The text of Article V could not be clearer that conventions are a permissible means of proposing amendments—the only one that originates outside Congress. The constitutional convention was invented on our shores and has been described by Gordon Wood as “the most distinctive institutional contribution … the American Revolutionaries made to Western politics.” Countries around the globe continue to hold constitutional conventions (also known as constituent assemblies) every few years or so.

Closer to home, U.S. states have held over 230 constitutional conventions since the Declaration of Independence, albeit none since the turn of the millennium. These conventions have an impressive track record. There is “compelling evidence,” as state constitutional expert Jonathan Marshfield has shown, “that state conventions are effective at empowering statewide majorities over misaligned and recalcitrant state governments,” consistently dislodging “advantages that wealthy private interests enjoy during ordinary legislative sessions” in favor of “groups with broader interests, fewer resources, and more public-regarding agendas.”

Yet, even if the idea of an Article V convention is not itself radical, the prospect of one being held in the United States today may still be alarming. Not only are we a deeply divided polity; we lack experience with conventions on a national scale. In the absence of historical precedents, the leading group that has been pushing for an Article V convention, Convention of States Action (COS), has put forward a reactionary plan. Appealing to a spurious originalism, COS insists on procedures—including unelected delegates and a norm of one-state-one-vote—that flout the values of popular sovereignty and political equality at the core of convention theory.

To wake Article V from its death-sleep without inviting chaos or partisan power grabs, opponents of the COS plan ought to be developing alternative approaches that are rooted in practical experience and designed to empower democratic majorities. One place to start is by looking to the states. As I describe in a recent essay, the states have converged over time on a sensible set of rules for running constitutional conventions that could be adapted to the federal level and, ideally, codified in advance.

Beyond establishing some ground rules and guardrails, those who wish to see constitutional conventions play a constructive role will need to re-familiarize the public with the institution. This could be done any number of ways. Congress, for example, could sponsor a series of citizens’ assemblies to generate or deliberate on amendment topics. Colleges could run model Article V conventions alongside their Model UN programs. Civic groups could support ballot measures for state constitutional conventions, a revival of which would bring significant democratic benefits in its own right.

Perhaps ironically, the best way to make constitutional conventions less scary may be to make them more ordinary. Thomas Jefferson famously recommended that conventions be held every 20 years or so. In a neo-Jeffersonian key, political entrepreneurs could promote state constitutional amendments that commit legislatures to submit Article V applications to Congress on a regular schedule.

Any scheme to make conventions more common will strike some as “extreme.” I feel trepidation about it as well. Yet almost everything about contemporary U.S. constitutional politics is extreme, from rampant gerrymandering and runaway inequality to hyper-partisanship and an administration that grows more authoritarian by the week. Insofar as changes to our structure of government are needed to break out of this doom loop, constitutional conventions deserve consideration.