Dime’s worth of difference?

The consensus that the nation is politically polarized is indisputable only because it is undisputed. Granted, there is cultural polarization about this and that—pronouns, bathrooms, indoctrination masquerading as education, etc. Politically, however—regarding government’s proper scope and actual competence—there is deepening bipartisan agreement. Unfortunately.

Concerning the broad contours of public policy, there is a disturbing convergence. Programmatically, the parties are more aligned than they have been since the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower caused Republicans to accept the permanency of the New Deal’s legacy: a transfer-payment state (Social Security, soon to include Medicare and much more) and federal supervision of the economy. The Republicans’ 1964 nominee Barry Goldwater expressed a growing exasperation with ideological homogenization, promising “A choice, not an echo.” He initiated an epochal divergence between the parties, which culminated 16 years later.

Today, beneath the frothy partisanship, Republican progressivism echoes the Democrats’. Both parties favor significant expansions of government’s control of economic activity and the distribution of wealth. Both promise to leave unchanged the transfer-payment programs (Social Security, Medicare) that are plunging toward insolvency and driving unsustainable national indebtedness.

And both parties favor tax increases: the Democrats on corporations, consumers and the 3 percent of individuals earning more than $400,000 annually; Republicans on consumers.

Substantial portions of the Democrats’ corporate taxes would be paid by employees in forgone compensation, or would be passed on to consumers (including the 97 percent earning less than $400,000) in the prices of products. Donald Trump’s promised 10 percent acrossthe-board tariff on all imports would be taxes (more than $300 billion annually, according to the Tax Foundation) paid by consumers.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics says: A tariff is “a tax on domestic consumption, since it raises the price buyers pay domestically.” The Center for American Progress Action Fund says: Trump’s tariff would cost a typical household “roughly $1,500 each year.” (The Peterson Institute says $1,700 from a typical middle-income family.) J.D. Vance, tribune of the working class, does not mind.

Inevitably, protectionism is government, responsive to big economic battalions, picking winners and losers. Organized labor, rent-seeking corporations and today’s Republicans favor it.

Eight years ago in “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance celebrated a Japanese corporation’s investment in a moribund Ohio steel company. Vance, whose versatility of conviction is the eighth wonder of the world, today opposes allowing Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel because Nippon’s “allegiances” are to “a foreign state.” (Actually, they are to shareholders, some of whom are probably Americans.)

Progressivism aims to build a society-saturating government, and especially an encompassing executive branch wielded by a president exercising vast discretion that is only vaguely, if at all, authorized and negligibly monitored by Congress. In the Biden administration, much the most progressive in U.S. history, the emblematic figure is Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Her aspiration is to untether antitrust enforcement from the “consumer welfare” standard. This would sever the FTC from restraining law, enormously enlarging government’s powers for economic “planning.” There would follow promiscuous interventions to strengthen the public sector’s dominance of what would become only a semiprivate sector. Vance thinks (as do the most progressive senators, independent Bernie Sanders and Democrat Elizabeth Warren) that Khan “is doing a pretty good job.”

In foreign policy, progressivism has a (Woodrow) Wilsonian faith in “soft” power as an alternative to the military sort. And the Democratic Party retains a not-negligible residue of its 1972 presidential nominee: Sen. George McGovern’s “Come home, America.” Vance seems unconcerned about the global tremors that result when a great nation loses a war, even a proxy war. His argument for abandoning Ukraine is couched in progressive tropes about spending instead on domestic constituencies.

Today’s GOP offers progressivism-lite: a less muscular America abroad, a more muscular government at home. Four summers from now, a fourth consecutive Republican convention might nominate a candidate who rejects, root and branch, traditional conservatism: limited government, constrained by the Constitution’s separation of its powers; modest government, allowing wealth and opportunity to be mostly allocated by voluntary market transactions.

Today’s Republicans disparage this traditional conservatism as “zombie Reaganism.” Actually, their repudiation encompasses John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and James Madison. A lot.