Tapped to give the official Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders put forth virtually nothing in the way of solutions to America’s problems. Nothing that really amounted to a vision for the future, and quite frankly, nothing that you couldn’t hear in some played-out bit about political correctness run amok. Gripes about the use of “Latinx?” Check. Belly-aching about kids being “indoctrinated” by the left? You know it. Railing against the “woke mob?” Obviously. This wasn’t a State of the Union response; it was a bunch of shock humor set-ups without any punchlines.
It’s not especially surprising that Sanders would lean hard into the culture war; her father, Mike Huckabee, has spent years on the front lines of these skirmishes. Not to mention, her old boss, Donald Trump, has enlisted his party into an endless series of petty battles. Still, it’s telling that the GOP took this tack as its official response to Biden’s substantial, forward-looking State of the Union, when it lost three straight elections doing just that. At best, Huckabee’s culture war message suggests that the party didn’t learn its lesson from its brutal underperformance in 2022. At worst, it makes plain that the GOP simply doesn’t have any other answers—that this is the absolute best the party can do right now.
“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight,” Sanders said at one point in her bleak rebuttal. “Republicans will not surrender this fight. We will lead with courage and do what’s right, not what’s politically correct or convenient.”
The notion that conservatives were somehow forced into the fray is obviously laughable; this is a lot whose most animating cause may be policing what books kids can read and what history they can learn. And when they aren’t freaking out about gas stoves or candy or fixing AR-15 pins to their lapels, they’re not exactly leading with “courage”; they’re coddling their most unhinged members, or sucking up to Trump, or undermining democracy. On the occasions they do enter policy debates, they can only gesture at an actual position, as we saw in Kevin McCarthy’s stand-off with Biden over the debt-ceiling. That was already clear prior to Tuesday night. But the speeches from Biden and Sanders affirmed the stark differences not only between two competing agendas, but the seriousness of the two parties.
Biden, in a commanding address, discussed a wide range of challenges facing the country—and issued specific calls to action to meet them. He was frank about obstacles in the way, but he was also hopeful, calling on Congress to face this “inflection point” with unity and optimism. “There is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together,” Biden said. Sanders, by contrast, had little to offer but fear and division: “America is great because we are free,” she said. “But today, our freedom is under attack, and the America we love is in danger.”
“President Biden and the Democrats,” she added, “have failed you.”
This kind of negativity and spin is part of politics, of course. But the thing that sets this iteration of the GOP apart is how little it has beyond that negativity and spin. Republicans have no clear ideas to sell. They don’t have an identity outside of the culture wars. Instead, the party seems to be organized around a desire to be as obnoxious as possible, all the time, as David Frum put it recently in the Atlantic.
There is clearly an audience for that kind of thing, which we saw when Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans heckled the president in defiance of McCarthy’s warning that members should steer clear of “childish games” and outbursts. But November’s midterms, like the two elections before it, suggest that much of the country wants something better, more substantial, and more sane. “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left,” Sanders said Tuesday night. “The choice is between normal or crazy.” She’s at least right about that, but not in the way that she thinks.
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