Did you catch the State of the Union address earlier this week? If so, congratulations—you’re part of an ever-shrinking cohort of Americans who still tunes in to this annual political tradition. And if you were looking for drama, it didn’t disappoint. There was Sen. Mitt Romney telling Rep. George Santos where to stick it, in his very polite Mormon sort of way. There was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene looking like a failed Iditarod contestant calling President Biden a liar. And there was a masterful moment when Biden got Republicans on the record defending Social Security and Medicare—after they feigned bewilderment over their own past assurances to abolish the popular programs.

As far as substance is concerned, there was markedly less. Sure, the president made the usual brag points about the improving economy, and he set up his 2024 run with an agenda he claimed is just getting started. Our personal favorite was his appeal to Congress for bipartisanship. In some ways they seemed anachronistic—a product of Biden’s long-ago Senate days, when he famously worked across the aisle in a way that just doesn’t happen much anymore. Yet, that’s exactly the problem: the stubborn inability of our lawmakers to conduct the country’s business in a democratic way is impeding national progress on multiple levels and holding us all back.

For anyone unsure of why partisan intransigence is such a problem, the Republican response to the SOTU made it painfully clear. Delivered by Arkansas’ new governor and Donald Trump’s former mouthpiece, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, it was a whole lot of red meat to the far right. She railed against the “woke agenda” and “indoctrination,” and spoke fondly of her foreign travels with Trump, conveniently leaving out that he later lied about an election and sparked an insurrection. Pesky details.

But Sanders did drop one acutely poignant line. With apparently zero self-awareness...