Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist for the NY Times, Nobel Prize winning economist, and City University of NY professor, has an op ed in the paper which mainly deals with trends toward extremism in the contemporary Republican Party.* But, within the piece, he drops in an observation on today's academia which could easily go unnoticed in the larger piece. Yours truly noticed:
"Political scientists argue that traditional forces of moderation have been weakened by factors like the nationalization of politics and the rise of partisan media, notably Fox News. This opens the door to a process of self-reinforcing extremism (something, by the way, that I’ve seen happen in a minor fashion within some academic subfields). As hard-liners gain power within a group, they drive out moderates; what remains of the group is even more extreme, which drives out even more moderates; and so on."
An interesting observation worth considering.
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*https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/republican-lies.html
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