Extreme [ik-streem], adj: 1a. Right of Evan Bayh

Paul Krugman is an exceptional writer. So talented is Krugman that he has managed to successfully argue and maintain demonstrably wrong positions for years. In his latest column, the extremely liberal Krugman has clearly wandered outside of his wheelhouse, and landed as an Object of Ridicule and Scorn.

GOING TO THE EXTREME  By Paul Krugman 

Utah Republicans have denied Robert Bennett, a very conservative three-term senator, a place on the ballot, because he’s not conservative enough. 

There’s one too many commas in that sentence, but I’ll let it slide.

Bennett was a fairly reliable Republican vote, but he was by no stretch of the imagination “very conservative.” The National Journal ranked Bennett the 23rd most conservative Senator in 2009. Bennett ranked 33rd in 2008 and 31st in 2007 when there were, admittedly, more Republican Senators. These rankings put Bennet square in the middle of the conservative political spectrum. Utah, however, is the 6th most conservative state in the country according to Gallup. Only Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Idaho, and Oklahoma lean further right. Clearly Bennett was not as conservative as the state he represented.

In Maine, party activists have pushed through a platform calling for, among other things, abolishing both the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. 

Does the introduction of these ideas at very least shatter the notion that Republicans are the “party of ‘no’”? Considering the abject failure of the Federal Reserve to moderate recessions (clearly) and the colossal incompetence of the public education system across the country, those both seem like reasonable responses to failed progressive ideas.

And it’s becoming ever more apparent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the ranting talk-show hosts. 

Oprah and Tyra Banks control the GOP? Oh, he means talk radio, a format whose arguments compete in the marketplace of ideas where the most persuasive arguments and voices receive the most attention. That does sound like a nefarious consolidation of power. Kind of like how Microsoft consolidates power by making the best operating system, or how ADP consolidates power by providing a uniquely efficient service.

News organizations have taken notice: suddenly, the takeover of the Republican Party by right-wing extremists has become a story (although many reporters seem determined to pretend that something equivalent is happening to the Democrats. It isn’t.) 

We know. It already happened when the most liberal and third most liberal Senators were elected president and vice president.

But why is this happening? And in particular, why is it happening now? 

Because the violent jerk in the American political dynamic to Obama's far-left radicalism has surprised those who sleep-walked through the 2008 electoral cycle. Because tax rates and government regulation have finally reached the tipping point by crippling companies, choking off the job market, impoverishing families, and disincentivizing any and all manifestations of achievement and competence.

The right’s answer, of course, is that it’s about outrage over President Obama’s “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts. 

Health Care Reform was foolish when Romney (acting as one of Krugman’s beloved moderates) did it in deep-blue Massachusetts. Romney, however, didn’t have the benefit of having seen his health care program crash and burn. Obama did, and peddled a doomed proposal anyways.

Many on the left argue, instead, that it’s about race, the shock of having a black man in the White House — and there’s surely something to that. 

As usual, the knee-jerk defense of Obama is based on some sort of delusional fantasy that liberal America is the new incarnation of the Abolitionist movement. Of course, for that fantasy to hold true, the opposition must have the major character flaw of racism.

But I’d like to offer two alternative hypotheses: 

First, Republican extremism was there all along — what’s changed is the willingness of the news media to acknowledge it. Second, to the extent that the power of the party’s extremists really is on the rise, it’s the economy, stupid. 

On the first point: when I read reports by journalists who are shocked, shocked at the craziness of Maine’s Republicans, I wonder where they’ve been these past eight or so electoral cycles. 

A point of agreement! For the past sixteen years, the media has both misunderstood and completely mischaracterized the conservative movement and the Republican Party in general.

For the truth is that the hard right has dominated the G.O.P. for many years. Indeed, the new Maine platform is if anything a bit milder than the Texas Republican platform of 2000, 

Which is significant because Maine and Texas are virtually identical—culturally, economically, politically, geographically.

which called not just for eliminating the Federal Reserve but also for returning to the gold standard, for killing not just the Department of Education but also the Environmental Protection Agency, and more. 

Yet, the Bush Administration expanded the roles of all three.

Somehow, though, the radicalism of Texas Republicans wasn’t a story in 2000, an election year in which George W. Bush of Texas, soon to become president, was widely portrayed as a moderate. 

Which, given the expansion of government through the 2000s was exactly how he governed.

Or consider those talk-show hosts. Rush Limbaugh hasn’t changed: his recent suggestion that environmentalist terrorists might have caused the ecological disaster in the gulf 

Which a) never happened, and b) Limbaugh has repeatedly explained was speculation surrounding the Obama administration’s decision to send SWAT teams to the rig.

is no worse than his repeated insinuations that Hillary Clinton might have been a party to murder. 

Not familiar with this reference…but it sounds dubious.

What’s changed is his respectability: news organizations are no longer as eager to downplay Mr. Limbaugh’s extremism 

The media barred Limbaugh from a bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams based on wholly untrue quotations about supporting slavery…THIS YEAR. News organizations are so eager to show Limbaugh’s extremism that they have gone to the lengths of making quotes up.

as they were in 2002, when The Washington Post’s media critic insisted that the radio host’s critics were the ones who had “lost a couple of screws,” 

They are.

that he was a sensible 

He is.

“mainstream conservative” 

He is.

who talks “mainly about policy.” 

Also true. Limbaugh is so mainstream, he draws more weekly listeners than the New York Times has subscribers. Easily.

So why has the reporting shifted? 

Because conservatives beat liberals like a snare drum in the realm of ideas and the explosion of new media outlets has continued to erode the influence of old-guard institutions of liberal defense like Krugman's New York Times.

Maybe it was just deference to power: 

I’d be willing to bet you can’t find one in ten literate citizens who think that the media bowed to the power of the Presidency during the Bush Administration.

as long as America was widely perceived as being on the way to a permanent Republican majority, 

It is. Liberals couldn’t run this country for six months before terrifying mainstream Americans back to the Republican Party in droves.

few were willing to call right-wing extremism by its proper name. 

“The founding principles of the United States of America?”

Maybe it took a Democrat in the White House to give some observers the courage to say the obvious. 

Or maybe liberal members of the media have been so hostile to the conservative agenda for so long that their audiences have tilted inexorably to the left. They’ve finally realized that courting battered conservatives with symbolic olive branches of "balance" is futile.

To be fair, however, it’s not all a matter of perception. Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy. 

I agree. Trusting a liberal with an economy is like giving a toddler a grenade. Trusting a liberal with a troubled economy is like appointing a drunken frat-boy to man the defibrulators in the ICU.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. 

This isn’t 1910. The colossal failure of any country foolish enough to fly a red banner has been recorded long ago. No one in their right mind would seek economic asylum under a new incarnation of the labor movement.

After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. 

This is like medieval doctors thinking a patient died because they didn’t let enough blood.

In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments 

Which no one on the left has actually made.

— and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right. 

Is that some sort of natural phenomenon, or might there be an actual reason for that?

That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. 

Krugman knows all too well that the modern right-wing in American politics isn’t defined by nationalism. In contrast to Europe, the American right is defined by a desire for limited government and responsible federal spending. Which makes comparing America to industrialized Europe useless. Put simply, we exist in the same political environment, but our political spectrums run along different axes.

The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis. 

Surely you didn’t think you’d get away with enacting the most staunchly liberal agenda in two generations and not have a backlash.

So where does our political system go from here? 

Onward and upward. To the right.

Over the near term, a lot will depend on economic recovery. If the economy continues to add jobs, we can expect some of the air to go out of the Tea Party movement. 

If the extremist element of the Republican Party can be mollified by a good economy, then how is it possible that the extremist element of the Republican Party has always been present?

But don’t expect extremists to lose their grip on the G.O.P. anytime soon. What we’re seeing in places like Utah and Maine isn’t really a change in the party’s character: it has been dominated by extremists for a long time. 

Except in good economies…

The only thing that’s different now is that the rest of the country has finally noticed. 

Krugman has finally stumbled upon the truth here. The only thing different right now is that the American people have finally noticed. They have noticed that liberals aren’t simply good-hearted Americans with a substanative, but constructive differences of opinion. They are political enemies that have targeted for destruction the institutions and traditions that ordinary Americans hold dear. America has simply noticed that there’s no such thing as a left-wing extremist because everything that comes out of the left is both extreme and dangerous.