"... when you use egalitarian benchmarks to indict the opposition, those benchmarks endure. In the next election, Republicans, too, will be measured by median income, black unemployment, and what they pay women."

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The US Is Moving Left Despite Republican Gains
By William Saletan, November 8, 2014

Republicans won big in the 2014 elections. They captured the Senate and gained seats in the House.

But they didn’t do it by running to the right. They did it, to a surprising extent, by embracing ideas and standards that came from the left.

I’m not talking about gay marriage, on which Republicans have caved, or birth control, on which they’ve made over-the-counter access a national talking point. I’m talking about the core of the liberal agenda: economic equality.

Here are some of the themes Republicans ran on in this year’s Senate and gubernatorial campaigns:

1. Poverty
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2. Minorities 
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3. Equal pay
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4. Median income
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5. Real unemployment
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6. Underemployment
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7. Part-time America
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8. Upward mobility
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9. Income inequality
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10. Labor vs. capital
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11. Minimum wage
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12. Earned income tax credit
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13. Progressive taxation
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Republicans picked up other liberal themes, too. They harped on the injustice of cutting Medicare, the importance of educational opportunity as “the great equalizer,” and the folly of gambling pension money in the stock market. They endorsed health care as a fundamental right, ridiculed the description of wealthy people as “middle-class,” and championed midnight basketball.

No, Republicans haven’t become liberals. They still hate taxes and blame everything bad on President Obama, Obamacare, and big government. But their focus on wage stagnation and class stratification reflects the economy and the political climate.

And when you use egalitarian benchmarks to indict the opposition, those benchmarks endure. In the next election, Republicans, too, will be measured by median income, black unemployment, and what they pay women.

They’ll have to account for the poverty rate, the tax burden on low-income people, and the widening gap between investors and laborers. It’s these underlying benchmarks, not the partisan composition of Congress, that signal the fundamental direction in which the country is heading.
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