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"A search of government records turns up a similar paucity of the expression in official American political discourse. Here again, when the expression does appear, it is typically employed to refer to European and, above all, German political phenomena. (See here, for instance, in the entry on Germany in the State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report.) Here again, when the expression is used to refer to American political phenomena, it is typically employed in an obviously politicized and hyperbolic manner to refer to mainstream Republicans — as, for instance, when Bernie Sanders, America’s only self-described 'socialist' senator, linked 'right-wing extremism' and the Bush administration. There is some scattered evidence of law enforcement officials occasionally using the term.
"If the expression 'right-wing extremism' is uncommon in American political discourse, however, its German equivalent — Rechtsextremismus — is a standard element of German political discourse. A search of the electronic archives of Germany’s paper of record, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), turns up over 2000 articles in which the term is used in just the last 16 years. A search of just the last year of the FAZ archives turns up 121 articles: more than twice the number found in the New York Times in the last twenty years. The German domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz], includes detailed information on “right-wing extremist” movements and detailed statistics on 'right-wing extremist' violence in each of its yearly reports. The section specifically devoted to the analysis of 'right-wing extremist' movements in the last available report (covering 2007) is over 80 pages long — this as compared to the scanty seven pages of would-be analysis in the DHS report. The Verfassungsschutz report also includes a section on 'left-wing extremism' [Linksextremismus] of about the same length."
