Follow-up on Radicalism

I've made this challenge before:

I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage. I've never heard an answer.

Last night I was with some conservative friends and I made that challenge in the course of our conversation.  For the first time I heard a kind of answer: the conservatives I was with agreed with each other that it's not exactly that the Democratic party has moved Left so much as that they have failed to acknowledge areas in which liberal dogma has been clearly proven wrong.  Their favorite example was unions- they argued that unions in the public sphere were destroying state and local government budgets, and Democrats were continuing to support them.

On one hand, this answer sort of concedes my argument that only one party is growing more radical, but at this point I don't see any other response to the point- it's just unassailable.

On the other hand, though, it's a legitimate point that begs a response so here it is:

First of all, if I conceded the point that Liberals continue to support unions in the face of all evidence, I could still point out that the Republican party is doing that in practically every area of public policy- Global Warming is accepted by pretty much every reputable science organization but is denied by conservatives.  Republicans continue to throw out tax plans claiming that lower taxes increase revenues, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.  I could go on and on.

But of course I don't concede the point that unions have outlived their usefulness.  It's not true that government workers are getting better benefits than they used to get.  It's just that workers outside of government are getting a lot less, because unions are dying out.  This is related to the "99%" issue- workers in the private sector have less power than they did 30 years ago as more industries have de-unionized, and the result has been that recent wealth gains have virtually all gone to the top 1% of our society.  So I'd frame the problem not as "too much for government workers", but rather as "not enough for private sector workers".

Now the response to that point was that "we can't be competitive" with unions in today's world, with 3rd world workers lining up to work for pennies a day.  But of course there's no competitiveness issue when it comes to government workers- we're not competing against Cambodia when it comes to paying for fire departments.

We can't afford to pay government workers because we have historically low tax rates.  There's an obvious solution to that problem.

Now it still may be true that governments have negotiated too many sweetheart deals with unions.  The solution to that problem isn't to deny workers the right to organize- it's to negotiate better deals, put up with strikes sometimes, etc- it's messy, but workers should have the right to organize in a free society.