"The Dictator's Handbook" by DeMesquita and Smith is a popular take on their academic work that describes a metamodel for reasoning about power and politics that bypasses how things "may" or "should" work and talks about how they "must" work.
This is a great book. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people who live in a nominal democracy see the title and think, "this doesn't apply to me." Even more unfortunately, it very much does apply to you, in, for example, the United States.
https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...
And a general +1 for GEB. If you read that as a teenager, you are different for it.