Extremism as a "metric". To understand if society is "doing a good enough job"

We are, without doubt, "experiencing is a systematic loss of faith in humanity and its institutions". I believe that this loss is manufactured, at least with respect to the right wing: people have been repeatedly told that they have grievances, and that they're all the fault of minority groups.

It doesn't mean that they don't also have genuine grievances. It just means that, if I'm correct, then the things that trigger the extremism metric are not the grievances that actually matter.

I could be wrong about that; maybe it's just a coincidence that there is massive right-wing media infrastructure that has been repeatedly called out for falsehoods. It could be that they are, perhaps despite themselves, documenting genuine failures.

But overall, no, I don't think that extremism makes a good metric. It's a purely one-sided metric; it cannot take into context anybody else's grievances or the actual magnitude of theirs. It's merely a squeaky wheel getting grease.