Children working in Mary Matalin's ideal America (1908).

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that Republicans want to repeal the Great Society and the New Deal, but the way they talk, it sounds to me like they want to go much further. Listen carefully to what former Cheney aide and professional wingnut Mary Matalin said on the latest “Left, Right & Center” (audio ca. 4:15).

There is no small amount of empirical data to say we’re at the end of this hundred year, European-originated social democracy welfare state experiment…there’s current data and there’s century’s long data that says we cannot sustain this trajectory.

Matalin’s chosen time frame isn’t arbitrary.

1911 was before three of the right’s most hated institutions were established: the Federal income tax (1913), the Federal Reserve (1913) and the Estate Tax (1916).

1911 also happens to be the year of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy that claimed the lives of