Com­ment: Nobel-Prize win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man has taken stock of a dis­turb­ing fact–economic cat­a­stro­phe pro­pels elec­torates in a right­ward direc­tion. In numer­ous broad­casts, we’ve high­lighted the deci­sive effect of the great depres­sion in win­ning hearts and minds for Hitler and his fel­low fas­cist dictators.

Some­thing sim­i­lar is man­i­fest­ing itself today in the U.S. and Europe.

“Going to Extreme” by Paul Krug­man; The New York Times; 5/16/2009.

Utah Repub­li­cans have denied Robert Ben­nett, a very con­ser­v­a­tive three-term sen­a­tor, a place on the bal­lot, because he’s not con­ser­v­a­tive enough. In Maine, party activists have pushed through a plat­form call­ing for, among other things, abol­ish­ing both the Fed­eral Reserve and the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. And it’s becom­ing ever more appar­ent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the rant­ing talk-show hosts.

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

. . . 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.

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. After all, the cri­sis made non­sense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In ret­ro­spect, how­ever, this was naïve: vot­ers tend to react with their guts, not in response to ana­lyt­i­cal argu­ments — and in bad times, the gut reac­tion of many vot­ers is to move right.

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