Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

“I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease,I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered, Or driven to its knees. Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right, For we’ve lived so well so long. Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on, I wonder what’s gone wrong. I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong.” - American Tune, 1973

Paul Simon wrote this song at a time of social upheaval and soon after a heartbreaking series of assassinations. America had just reelected Richard Nixon, who promised “law and order” and “traditional values.” Instead, we got one of the most petty, spiteful, and corrupt men ever to occupy the White House. The Watergate investigation and Congressional hearings exposed his crimes, and his Republican colleagues in Congress urged him to resign to avoid impeachment, and in 1975, he did.

After an assassination attempt against former President Trump, and in another time of great uncertainty and upheaval, everyone not busy concocting conspiracy theories is again wondering what’s gone wrong. The answers are complicated, but we know one thing for sure: violence won’t fix it, nor will a strong-man government.

Either we return to the work of making “more perfect” a government that was created to serve people and check power, or we accept an America that only serves power and those who bow to power.

Donald Trump is Nixon’s moral descendent, but he isn’t the problem. Killing him won’t solve a thing. He is just the carbuncle that’s emerged from a long-standing infection deep within the GOP. It was in 2001 that Grover Norquist summarized its mission: to reduce government to the size where “we can drown it in a bathtub.” Every one of us should take this personally. In our republic, we are the government. That’s the whole point of the Constitution. Drowning government means drowning America.

This isn’t just about party; corruption is undeclared. In the mid-20th century, Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley ran an administration based on grift and graft. He appointed loyalists to commissions and agencies meant to oversee public projects. They awarded contracts to their cronies and controlled around 35,000 jobs in construction, real estate, and government.

Daley created monuments to his political machine’s greatness like O’Hare Airport and the famous Loop. He also made sure freeways split up and demolished established neighborhoods whose residents didn’t have the means to pay him off. They then were forced into tenements built by “friendly” developers who got taxpayer-funded contracts, hired cronies, cut corners on construction, and pocketed the savings.

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Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but his name appears in it over 300 times. Chapter 3 (pp. 69-85) is a tutorial on how this team would take crony capitalism nationwide: purge public agencies of public servants and replace them with party loyalists by gutting worker protections. Centralize hiring decisions, even for military contractors, within the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), both staffed by the president. “The MSPB could then become the main reviewer of adverse actions, greatly simplifying the burdensome appeal process.” (p. 76)

This is the heart of the scam. Under Trump, the MSPB would be nothing but an acronym. We know this because as president, it was his job to fill a vacated seat. He refused, and lacking a quorum, it was, as intended, powerless. This means the president’s inner circle at OPM would have total control over hiring and firing. The following chapters of Project 2025 detail how every public agency will then either be dissolved or staffed with ethically pliable loyalists. An online database is already accepting applications.

We in New Hampshire are familiar with corruption of public agencies. Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, with the help of a Republican majority in the Legislature, instituted Education Freedom Accounts that skim tax dollars meant to fund public education, launder them through the NH Children’s Scholarship Fund, and funnel them to private, for-profit, and parochial schools. It also prevents the DOE from exercising oversight over EFAs. Are beneficiaries spending our tax dollars wisely? Are teachers qualified? Is curriculum education, indoctrination, or family vacation? We have no way of knowing, and that’s the whole point.

America’s first Republican president spoke directly to our present condition: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us…. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or died by suicide.”

If America is to live, we must have at least two healthy parties. The GOP is poisoning itself with political corruption and violence. The Democrats are a bit of a disputatious mess right now, but that’s how democracy always gets done. So it’s up to us to do two things: make sure our own party lives up to our highest ideals; and send the GOP home to heal itself so it can become a worthy adversary again.