Going to Extreme Krugman

[elleng]

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.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17krugman.html?th&emc=th

[Demeter]

1. Well, Maybe

I think there are a lot of free-floating voters who cannot attach to either party, the kind who want to eat their cake and still have it simultaneously, without the effort of baking it.

The Lazy Voters want prepackaged candidates in the latest styles with all the bells and whistles. The concept of Party Platform escapes them, perhaps because so often that platform is mere window-dressing to lure in the suckers--change you can believe in, for example.

The Lazy Voters have no concept of what our nation could look like, if we adopted some different national goals and methods. So, they keep voting for the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome. The Definition of Insanity applies here.

The nation keeps moving to the Right, because the Economic Overlords won't permit it to move anywhere else. Unfortunately, in searching for change at any cost, the voters lose everything that made Lady Liberty's torch a beacon to the oppressed.

[geckosfeet]

2. More...

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. 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 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.

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.

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 is no worse than his repeated insinuations that Hillary Clinton might have been a party to murder. What’s changed is his respectability: news organizations are no longer as eager to downplay Mr. Limbaugh’s extremism 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,” that he was a sensible “mainstream conservative” who talks “mainly about policy.”

So why has the reporting shifted? Maybe it was just deference to power: as long as America was widely perceived as being on the way to a permanent Republican majority, few were willing to call right-wing extremism by its proper name. Maybe it took a Democrat in the White House to give some observers the courage to say the obvious.

He goes on to say that there is "striking correlation" between "economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations" and movements towards right wing national politics (tea baggers).

However, I observe that Limpballs has been spewing his idealogy for more than 20 years, through good times and bad. And that he rocketed to prominence during the Clinton administration, as did FAUX news. IMO this points to a shift in media bias towards the radical fringe right.

[Stuart G]

3. I do believe that extrmeism is always there.

Making seem less it is I believe is very very dangerous. That is what I fear is happening now.