Washington's biggest problem: not agreeing on the problem.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

Gridlock rules Washington not just because the parties can't agree on solutions to our nation's problems, but because they can't even agree on what the problems are. Senate Republicans didn't block Barack Obama's cap-and-trade bill in 2010 because they favored different policies---say, a carbon tax--for controlling global warming. They blocked it because they didn't believe that global warming is real, or if it is real that human activity causes it, or if human activity does cause it that there's much of anything we can do about it that's worth the price we'd have to pay. GOP lawmakers don't oppose Obamacare because they prefer a different health care reform policy (House Republicans still haven't put forth their much-ballyhooed plan to "replace" the law despite voting fifty-six times to repeal it), but because the widespread lack of health insurance among lower-income Americans is simply not, to most conservatives, a first-order issue requiring government intervention.

The same has long been true about income inequality and wage stagnation. For years, conservatives outright denied that U.S. incomes were growing more unequal. After Thomas Piketty and other academics, not to mention the lived experience of the vast majority of Americans, made that denial untenable, conservatives shifted to the position that, even if inequality is growing, any attempt to contain or reverse it would be an unacceptable blow to "job creators." As recently as the 2014 midterms, it was hard to find a single Republican campaigning for office on the problem of inequality and stagnant incomes.

But all that changed, with stunning speed, two months after the polls closed last November. First, Jeb Bush, as part of his unexpectedly swift entry into the 2016 presidential race, announced that the problem of reduced upward mobility for average Americans would be a centerpiece of his campaign. Soon afterward, during his aborted 2016 test run, Mitt Romney, Mr. 47 Percent himself, gave a talk bemoaning growing inequality and poverty. In short order, John Boehner, Chris Christie, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Paul Ryan joined them in condemning the lack of wage growth for average Americans.

There was a proximate political reason for this shift. With sights now turned toward 2016, Republicans were confronted, finally, with convincing evidence of robust economic growth under Obama. So they latched on to the one lamentable figure in the data, weak wage growth, as something...