Maybe polarization is simply a product of large volumes of political neophytes.

From Democrats’ Problem Is Not The 70-Somethings Leading The Party, It’s Their Socialist Young by Warren Henry. In answering one question, Henry actually points toward another. It seems to me.

Henry's argument.

The Democrats’ problem is not that 70-somethings are still lingering in leadership. Their problem is that its younger activist class and its non-representative woke elite are trying to fill the vacuum they created when their extremism decimated a generation of more mainstream Democratic politicians (but not the voters they represented).

These younger Democrats are echoing the New Left of the late Sixties and early Seventies. In 1972, George McGovern lost in a landslide to the seemingly divisive and unlikable Richard Nixon by running on a far-left hippie platform of “abortion, amnesty, and acid.”

The 2020 Democratic nominee is unlikely to lose in a landslide, given our increasing polarization and demographic change. But it is the younger Democrats, not the older ones, who are reducing their odds of political victory.

Fair enough. That is a workable and plausible argument.

I am not sure that what I am thinking is all that different. It seems to me that perhaps it is not old versus young mindsets, which is Henry's frame, but experienced versus inexperienced.

Maybe that's too thin a hair to split.

I go back to the decimation of Democratic positions in various branches of government over the eight years of the Obama administration.

Consider the Obama era. Over the course of Barack Obama’s tenure as president, the Democrats lost more than 1,030 seats in state legislatures, governor’s mansions, and Congress.

At the time I argued that this betrayed a self-centered narcissism on the part of Obama. His desire to pursue policies amicable to his own world view without accommodating others in his party whose survival depended on appealing to a broader range of the electorate, I thought, was a reprehensible abdication of leadership. He seemed more interested in his own stature in history than the electoral health of his party.

The first drubbing in the off-year election of 2010 should have served as a warning. It was ignored and the carnage was as bad or worse in 2014.

Any organization, when it suffers a massive loss of membership, is at risk. It is not all downside. Large reductions in force are an opportunity to revisit assumptions, ways of doing business, etc. At the same time, that upside is discounted by the loss of morale, loss of network effects, loss of institutional knowledge, and loss of cultural integrity.

Right now, with the crop of new people from the 2018 elections, a lot of attention is being focused on three lightweights. Probably more, but these are the ones who come to mind - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.

Each has their own dynamic - Ocasio-Cortez for foolish things, Tlaib for anti-semitic things, and Omar for just plain incomprehensibly weird things (two husbands?) spiced with anti-semitism. They are squeaky wheels which are hijacking the legislative process. Kudos for being effective in doing so but the health of public discourse will improve dramatically once they lose their reelection bids.

Sure, OCTO are prone also to some extraordinarily foolish policy statements and philosophical positions in addition to their other attributes.

But why are they getting so much attention? You can understand Fox wanting to make them the face of the new Democratic Party, but CNN, MSNBC and the others all seem to not be able to get enough of them. Perhaps it is just click traffic.

Henry's article prompts a second thought. Perhaps it only seems so crazy and heated simply because the Democrats are fielding so many new and untested figures. Their benches were wiped clean, they have had to run with who they have rather than picking who they want.

So perhaps the polarization is not really a function solely of extreme policies by neophytes. Perhaps it is simply the fact that there are now so many neophytes without tenure or experience who have gained prime time platforms long before they are ready for prime time.