Krugman – The G.O.P. – Going to Extreme – NYTimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n\u2026 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.<\/p>\n
True, that\u2019s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers \u2014 myself included<\/strong> \u2014 expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right\u2019s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was na\u00efve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments<\/strong> \u2014 and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Br\u00fcckner and Hans Peter Gr\u00fcner, 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. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Better late than never. The new Krugman will be even more interesting than the old one was.<\/p>\n
* I suspect on average, over time, the system in which we are embedded is more rational than it seems, but that\u2019s another post. (Yes, sounds like \u201cpsychohistory\u201d, and, yes, Krugman, like me, grew up on Asimov.)<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"