Yeah, really. I have extremely left-wing opinions, to the point that most Americans would indeed consider me a left-wing extremist. However, these questions seem to me to fail to capture the interesting degrees of variation. For example, there's no option given for the right-wing position that poor people are not merely poor due to their own faults, but that in fact government policy should be used to appropriate what little they have and make them even poorer, or that foreigners should not merely be left outside the United States via restrictive immigration, but bombed into oblivion. Neither is there an option for saying that we should not merely use taxation to redistribute wealth to the poor, but actually seize the means of production and abolish wage-labor. The statement about Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans fails to capture what really happened in the post-WW2 decades to integrate those minorities. The questions on science versus religion contain no options for fundamentalist religion or transhumanism (despite the fact that Evangelical Christians make up 20% of the total population!). The question about marriage doesn't ask whether husbands should be able to beat or rape disobedient wives. I can't even answer the question about driving a car, because I don't.

The interesting thing about studies of extremism lies in finding out exactly which views are considered the normative mainstream, and which views are considered "out-of-sight".