The 'Soulcraft' we need from lawmakers in House, Senate

In 1983, the conservative writer George Will wrote a slim volume entitled "Statecraft as Soulcraft" in which he argued that he did not see a problem of "big" government so much as a problem of the abdication of government.

Will wrote this a decade before Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and nearly 20 years before the influential conservative lobbyist Grover Nordquist argued that he did not want to abolish government but only reduce it in size to the point where he could "drag it into the bathroom and drown it in a bathtub."

Will argued that we live in an age of complexity necessitating that government today is run by specialists - scientists, lawyers, accountants, and, yes, even diplomats. As I wrote in these pages two years ago, if you follow the money, you can see exactly what the federal government does - it pays the interest on our debt, it provides pensions, health care, and security, which is everything from the FBI to nuclear weapons, and it subsidizes education, housing, agriculture and a host of businesses. It defines the economic playing field but also the moral character of the nation - discrimination, for example, shall not be tolerated. Rights, as defined by the constitution and by statute, shall be protected.

We have just completed the 116th Congress, which will go down in history as the least productive in the nation's history. Some 15,000 bills were proposed and only one percent were passed. In a normal Congress, perhaps three or four percent of bills would become law. The division between a Republican Senate and Democratic House was the main reason. A president who knows little and cares little about policy was another reason, as was a Senate majority leader unwilling to even allow many bills to come to the floor for a vote, even when there was bipartisan support in the political center. Sen. McConnell's desk earned the epitaph "the legislative graveyard" fairly.

Now, McConnell will be, in his words, "playing defense" as minority leader. A new president with an ambitious agenda will arrive on Jan. 20. For those who wish to see the glass as half full, the recent efforts by a bipartisan group of legislators to pass a COVID relief bill and the spending bill, there might be hope that President Biden, a creature of the Senate, might be able to get something done. For those who see the glass as half empty, the poison that spilled into the halls of Congress on Wednesday suggests that the tribalism that has riven our country has reached such a level that words like compromise are somehow conflated with appeasement and treason.

Can we hope that the shock of what has happened in our Capitol will scare our leaders, in both parties, to take a step back, sit down together and agree that there is much work to be done and that government needs to get about the business of doing that work - getting the pandemic under control, restarting the economy, meeting threats to our security from cyber attacks to climate change, and finding fixes for a long list of priorities that run the gamut from broken bridges to a broken immigration system?

Polling tells us that the American people want our legislators to work together to solve the nation's problems. The polls also tell us that most Americans do not follow policy debates closely - they have their lives to live - but it would seem that citizens can make a judgment as to whether or not their congressmen and senators are trying to build or trying to obstruct. The ones who show they are willing to work together and do the hard, hard work of finding common ground deserve our support.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.