Feb 25, 2022 - Fighting has reached the suburbs and historic center of Kyiv after a night of Russian missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital, as Moscow indicated it was ready to talk and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pleaded for international help.

Russian forces advanced to the outskirts of the capital from three sides on Friday while Ukrainian soldiers established defensive positions at key bridges and patrolled in armored vehicles down the city’s streets watched by anxious residents.

A day after Russia launched a massive invasion of its south-western neighbor, the defense ministry in Moscow claimed it had cut Kyiv off from the west and seized a strategic airport at Hostomel, on the city’s outskirts, allowing it to airlift troops to the front.

Ukrainian officials said 1,000 Russian servicemen had been killed so far, but warned that advance enemy units had already entered the Obolonskyi district of northern Kyiv. The defense ministry advised residents to “prepare molotov cocktails”.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, said the city had entered “a defensive phase”. He added: “Shots and explosions are ringing out … and saboteurs have already entered Kyiv. The enemy wants to put the capital on its knees and destroy us.”

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia was ready to send a delegation, including foreign and defense ministry officials, to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, for talks with Ukraine, providing the country agreed to demilitarise.

Ukraine has said it is willing to discuss declaring itself a neutral county. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also said Moscow was ready for talks if Ukrainian forces laid down their arms. “No one is planning to occupy Ukraine,” Lavrov said, insisting Russia’s troops were freeing Ukraine from “oppression”.

Zelenskiy pleaded with western powers to act faster to cut off Russia’s economy and provide Ukraine with military assistance. “When bombs fall on Kyiv, it happens in Europe, not just in Ukraine,” he said. “When missiles kill our people, they kill all Europeans.” ...Read More

Feb 18, 2022 - This is the third a series of columns looking at Left strategy today. Key to Strategy #1 focused on the first component of Sun Tzu’s dictum that to prevail in battle it is necessary to “know the enemy and know yourself.” Key to Strategy #2 focused on the second component. This final installment looks at the balance of strength among the main contending forces in national politics and its strategic implications.

The danger posed by Trumpism’s “Big Lie” drive for power permeates the US political landscape. To effectively combat the MAGA assault requires the Left to do more than work harder at what we are already doing. We need to attempt new levels of coordination and be willing to take risks.

Our strategizing must be grounded in a hard-nosed assessment of the current balance of strength both between the MAGA and anti-MAGA blocs, and within the diverse coalition arrayed against racist authoritarianism.

When we take inventory as this column tries to do, the complexity of navigating the next three years—including but not only the 2022 and 2024 elections—stands out.

Progressives cannot stop MAGA alone. It will take an alliance of all those who reject authoritarian rule to accomplish that goal. But it will require more imagination and strain than it did in 2020 to galvanize a winning electoral coalition and, if necessary, demonstrate sufficient strength in streets, workplaces, schools, and communities to turn back another attempted election steal. Clear-target Donald Trump is no longer in the White House. Rather, there is a Biden administration that has not offered a compelling narrative concerning what it has and has not been able to accomplish and is pursuing a backward and potentially disastrous foreign policy.

Further, increasing the strength of progressives relative to our anti-Trump allies is essential if a post-Trump country is going to yield substantial positive change rather than status quo injustice. But key aspects of building progressive clout are certain to take longer to accomplish than the next three years.

There is no yellow brick road that we can travel to circumvent these realities. The degree of sophistication at “unity and struggle” within a broad coalition that will be required will stretch our current experience and maturity to the limit. We will need a new level of consultation and coordination among different parts of the progressive eco-system to keep our balance and provide mutual support.

Success will require us to stretch, but both the incentives and the necessary groundwork to make these breakthroughs exist.

The MAGA bloc is dead set on capturing both houses of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. They are optimistic about their prospects for doing so and entrenching an “America First”/Jim Crow 2.0 regime.  

They have taken control of the Republican Party and enjoy support from roughly one-third of the electorate. They have a firm grip on the Supreme Court. MAGA enthusiasts and enablers have enough votes in the Senate to block legislation they don’t like and are less than a dozen seats shy of a majority in the House. The GOP controls both the legislatures and governorships in 23 states and shares control with Democrats in 13 more.

The coffers of MAGA-world organizations are overflowing with cash. White supremacist militias and gun-toting loners ginned up on conspiracy theories have been welcomed into the fold and are deployed to intimidate election workers and teachers. The penetration of various armed agencies of the state (local police, border patrol, the military, etc.) by MAGA supporters is also of great concern.

That’s an impressive arsenal. But two additional factors make MAGA a uniquely potent force in the already-rigged-in-their-favor US political system.

First, MAGA has deep roots in a genuine mass organization, one that tens of millions of people join and participate in, not because they decided they agreed with a political platform but because it fit organically into their conditions of life. This country’s white evangelical churches were not built by Trumpists. But MAGA organizers recognized that these churches were a huge source of identity for millions and, if won to their banner, could give MAGA a deeply committed base. For decades they cultivated church leaders and amplified into political grievance the white racial anxiety that had long been part of white evangelical culture. The result is adherence to MAGA rooted in “reflexive [white] tribal loyalty.” The recent mobilizations of MAGA supporters at local hearings on COVID-19 policy and local school board meetings (part of the campaign to whitewash US history under the guise of opposing CRT) demonstrate just how deep this loyalty runs.   

MAGA organizers recognized that these churches were a huge source of identity for millions and, if won to their banner, could give MAGA a deeply committed base.

Second, MAGA has a unified command, a single narrative, and a direct link to its supporters through a large-scale right-wing media apparatus. Within hours of any new development in politics, culture, or international affairs, an assessment that fits that development into the MAGA narrative is put forward by MAGA elected officials, pundits, preachers, FOX News, One America News Network, Newsmax, and talk radio.

Most people in the U.S. are opposed to the MAGA platform and approach to governance. The majority registered its verdict clearly in the 2018 and 2020 elections. The 2018 mid-terms were a “blue wave,” with the Democrats beating the GOP in the total popular vote for House seats by nearly 10 million votes and in the total popular vote for Senate seats by close to 18 million votes. In the 2020 presidential contest—the most straightforward referendum on Trump and Trumpism yet —Trump lost by more than seven million votes.

But the anti-MAGA majority does not function with the coherence the Trumpists do. It is far more diverse sociologically and politically. Its component parts do not all oppose MAGA for the same reasons, and there is a wide range of opinions among them concerning an alternative vision for the country. The closest thing it has to a common narrative is strictly defensive in nature—”we are defending US democracy against the MAGA assault on it”—and there is disagreement on the character of the democracy the anti-MAGA bloc is defending.

Because of this, the forces arrayed against Trumpism do not have anything resembling a unified leadership holding political and moral authority. Taken together these forces command financial resources comparable to MAGA, but they are not deployed with the same degree of focus. They have nothing comparable to the right’s media machine in either scale or “message discipline.” The mainstream media does tilt anti-Trumpist, but its approach to “balance” added to its longstanding anti-Left and anti-working-class bias means it lacks the capacity to unify and rally the opposition.

An especially big problem preventing the pro-democracy majority from functioning politically as more than the sum of its parts is the fragmentation of its base. The organizational forms which historically have served to bind together individuals in the constituencies most likely to be mainstays of democracy have weakened in the last few decades. The labor movement and the Black church no longer outdo—or even match—the way white evangelical churches create a powerful sense of community and common interest among tens of millions.

Unions bring workers together based on common location in the socio-economic structure, not because individuals decide they agree with a certain political view. Yet, by bringing workers of all backgrounds together they provide favorable conditions for encouraging their members to think in terms of “an injury to one is an injury to all” and to break down racial and gender stereotypes and prejudices. Unions are organizations of the exploited, and even politically or organizationally weak ones have functioned in most times and places as defenders of democracy when it is under attack.

There are signs of new union and individual worker militancy, and a committed cohort of young radicals are dedicating themselves to revitalizing the unions from the bottom up. Making progress on this front is an urgent day-in and day-out priority. But even anticipating periodic leaps forward, getting labor to something like its 1954 density (35%) and uniting the union movement on a progressive agenda is a long-term project. In 2021, union density fell from 10.8% to 10.3% of the workforce the previous year; in the private sector density is down to 6.1%, the lowest figure since data became available in 1900. Labor’s decline not only diminishes the numbers that can be galvanized to oppose the authoritarian right, it weakens the influence of working-class politics within the anti-MAGA front.

Labor’s decline not only diminishes the numbers that can be galvanized to oppose the authoritarian right, it weakens the influence of working-class politics within the anti-MAGA front.

The Black church’s clout, meanwhile, is affected by a widening generation gap in the African American community over religion, institutional affiliation and politics. There are initiatives underway to once again position church-based projects at the forefront of emancipatory activism (The Poor Peoples Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival stands out in this regard). There are efforts to build bridges between church-based activism and the new organizations fighting for Black Liberation that have been formed by younger activists. But the Black community does not yet have a level of galvanized and interlocking mass organizations, religious and/or otherwise, comparable to the white evangelical churches.

This too means a smaller turnout against the Trumpists and weakens the urgently needed racial justice pole within the anti-MAGA coalition.

The anti-MAGA majority that made its weight felt in 2018 and 2020 still exists. But it faces new hurdles due to MAGA-sponsored voter suppression laws in many states. And the inability of the Biden administration to deliver big positive changes in people’s lives—even though largely due to GOP obstructionism and the depth of the problems it inherited on coming into office—means it will be harder to motivate that majority to organize, vote, and mobilize to protect the vote in the upcoming contests.

The different political forces arrayed against MAGA bring different strengths to the battlefield.

“Never Trumpers”—Republican and former Republican conservatives who oppose Trump—are the smallest in size of anti-MAGA forces. Though anchored by numerous former GOP elected officials and well-known intellectuals, their base is estimated at just a sliver of the electorate. But their much-publicized presence, and especially the roles of Congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on the committee investigating January 6, is a counterweight to the misleading frame that what is going on in US politics is a partisan fight between Democrats and Republicans. Replacing that fiction with an accurate narrative—this is a fight between opponents of democracy who have captured the GOP and defenders of democracy of all political persuasions—is a key part of winning the battle for public opinion.

The Democratic Party mainstream led by Biden, Schumer and Pelosi currently holds sway within the anti-Trump front. All but three of the 50 Democratic senators follow their lead (Bernie Sanders to their left, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to their right). About half of the Democratic Party House delegation are loyal followers, and the party leadership has various levels of influence on the rest. This tendency has comparable strength at the state and local levels. Based on the results of the 2020 presidential primary, somewhere between 55% and 60% of Democratic voters currently back their candidates.   

Most Democratic Party large-donor funding goes to the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi camp. Most established pollsters and campaign consultants take their lead. Network television and the most influential newspapers in the country usually have their back. Many (too many!) in labor’s top leadership and the Black political establishment are in the fold. But what was once a large network of active party clubs has been hollowed out in many states, loosening this tendency’s roots among voters.

Biden administration domestic initiatives have differed markedly from the neo-liberal offerings of the Clinton and Obama years. They contain numerous provisions that are very popular among Democrats, independents and even many Republicans. But the combination of a legislative strategy that counted too much on no-longer-existing “bi-partisanship,” poor messaging that did not make clear what the administration was advocating, and failure to pass key initiatives in face of Republican and Manchin-Sinema opposition, has crashed Biden’s approval ratings.   

The progressive current in US politics has come a long way since 2015. Bernie Sanders and the Squad (now expanded from four to six, all people of color) are the broad Left’s most popular figures and constitute the closest thing progressives have to a leadership with political authority. The Congressional Progressive Caucus now has close to 100 members and for the first time has agreed to function with a measure of political discipline. Numerous specific issues central to the progressive agenda have majority support among Democrats (and sometimes even in the overall population). But the percent of Democrats who will consistently support progressive candidates over Biden-Schumer-Pelosi favorites is likely 25-35%.

 The progressive current in US politics has come a long way since 2015.

At the level of activists and the base, progressives are fragmented into a host of different organizations. There is differentiation into various sector-based and issue-based formations. An array of state-based power building groups, national organizing networks, and election-oriented forms that operate inside and outside the Democratic Party nationwide have grown substantially in sophistication and reach in the last five years.

But coordination and synergy between electoral and crucial non-electoral organizing is not where it needs to be. In contrast to the 1980s when the bulk of progressive groups, whether their focus was on electoral or non-electoral efforts, joined the Jesse Jackson-led Rainbow Coalition, no single coalition or standing network grew out of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns or the 2020 uprising to defend Black lives, or has come together via some other route.

A major plus for the progressive current is that the strength it showed in 2020 has forced a shift in the dynamics and policy agenda of the Democratic Party. In the 2020 primary season the main fight was between progressives backing Bernie (and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Warren) and “moderates” who eventually coalesced behind Biden. Now the main intra-Party contention has Bernie and Biden on the same side against Manchin, Sinema and the small group of their counterparts in the House. The Biden-Bernie cooperation was not enough to push through Build Back Better or crucial voting rights legislation. But it can be built on to improve the effectiveness of the 2022 anti-MAGA effort to maintain Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Differences between progressives and the Biden camp remain on a host of issues, of course. And one looms ever-larger over all others: the Biden administration’s embrace of Cold War-style policies toward China and Russia and its general bent toward militarism, bullying, and intervention. The Democratic mainstream has chucked the neoliberal model, but they are wedded as ever to exercising US global hegemony. If those militarist impulses can’t be checked, we may see a 21st-century repeat of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. Some of the most forward-looking legislation in US history (the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare, the end of racist immigration quotas) passed under LBJ, but the imperial and racist war in Vietnam undermined the whole progressive enterprise.

A repeat of that experience today would spell global catastrophe. It is urgent to build mass opposition to this administration’s moves toward war even as we strain every nerve to keep MAGA out of power.

It is also urgent to invest in work that has less immediate payoff but is crucial for building progressive power for the long haul. That means devoting resources to the patient, day-in and day-out organizing aimed at embedding radicals in organizations—some existing and some yet to be built—rooted in the multiracial working class and in people of color communities on a scale of millions.

No single group or circle on the Left currently has a sufficient combination of strategic acuity, organizational strength, mass influence, and welcoming political culture to lead us all through this minefield. To succeed we will need to sort through our differences, build on our unities, and pool our strengths. ...Read More

Such is the centrality of Ukraine in general, and Kyev in particular, to the imagination of the Russian church, they have been prepared to fracture the centuries old alliance of Orthodoxy. Again and again, it’s all about Ukraine, the imagined site of the mother church of the Rus. ...Read More

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Photo: The Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star Roberto Clemente was greatly admired by his Puerto Rican community (above: in 1962 coaching a local children's team) for his philanthropic pursuits on the island. Courtesy of the Clemente Museum

Baseball is thought to have been introduced to the Caribbean and later Latin America by the children of wealthy Cubans who were sent to the United States in the 1860s for schooling. Returning home with enthusiasm for the new sport, as well as lugging back equipment, they spread the gospel of baseball across the islands, and then to the Dominicans, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and throughout South America.

More than a century and a half later, fully 30 percent of Major League Baseball rosters are Latino and the game would be very different without their participation.

A new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History “¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues/En los barrios y las grandes ligas” celebrates the big-league successes and renown stars like Roberto Clemente to Fernando Valenzuela to Pedro Martínez and Anthony Rendon.

But the show on view in the museum’s Albert M. Small Documents Gallery also pays heed to women in the sport, from half-remembered stars of the women’s league to the owner of today’s Colorado Rockies, Linda Alvarado, whose quote is written on the walls: “Latinos have changed baseball, period.”

 

Stories and objects included in this volume brings our seemingly disparate pasts and present together to reveal how baseball is more than simply a game. The history of Latinos and baseball is this quintessential American story.

Curator Margaret N. Salazar-Porzio says she spent six years on the project. She began not with the biggest names, but in small community meetings where information was shared about individual Latino leagues of baseball enthusiasts. She traveled to Southern California, Florida, rural Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska where she discovered the stories of players in the Spanish Colony league, who built up their pitching arms by whacking at sugar beets with big knives all day.

“The community-driven aspect of it is what I’m most proud of,” she says. In Puerto Rican communities of New York City, stickball was king, and a bat, cobbled together from a broom handle and a bicycle inner tube is on display alongside the smaller Spalding ball they still use.

It was tough to find examples of balls or gloves people used because they were so worn out, Salazar-Porzio says. There is a handmade ball from Cuba made from wrapping tape around a solid core. A glove donated by a family from La Puente, California, was stitched and restitched over generations (it came with extra lace and needles just in case). In the 1980s fast-pitch softball player Chris González received a pair of game-worn cleats from the equipment manager of the Kansas City Royals and wore them for the rest of his career even though they were two sizes too small; he gifted them to the museum.

In a film that accompanies the exhibition, a Major League star shows how folded cardboard was commonly used in place of leather gloves in the fields (surviving examples of those, understandably, didn’t survive).

As Salazar-Porzio put together the show after visiting 15 states and Puerto Rico, themes emerged. “Over and over again, I would hear these stories about the love of baseball, people’s memories of the game, how baseball and softball really helps local communities grapple with racism and discrimination,” she says. “It was really trying to figure out with them how to talk about this history.”

Discrimination kept even the best players like Martín Dihigo, José Méndez and Cristóbal Torriente from playing professional. Baldomero “Mel” Almada was the first Mexican to play in the major leagues. Between 1933 and 1939 he would play center field for the Boston Red Sox, the Washington Senators, the St. Louis Browns and the Brooklyn Dodgers. “We witness how some players like Ted Williams kept their Mexican ancestry hidden,” wrote historian Adrian Burgos Jr in the show’s catalog. “Alamada, a Mexican native who was raised in Los Angeles, did not.”

Between 1933 and 1939, Baldomero “Mel” Almada (above in 1936)—the first Mexican to play in the major leagues—would play center field for the Boston Red Sox, the Washington Senators, the St. Louis Browns and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

Before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, a few franchises sought out Latino players, “as long as the individual player,” wrote Burgos, “was not clearly black.”

The Negro Leagues welcomed Latinos regardless, looking only for the talent needed to fill their ranks. The Cuban Stars of the Negro Leagues hired second baseman Dihigo, who could play any position, including pitcher; he would be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Renowned throughout Latin America (he’s also in the halls of fame of Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic), he’s not as well remembered as players in the majors whose stellar stats were similar.

The acceptance was reciprocal, Salazar-Porzio says, as some U.S. players in the Negro League also found a home playing in international leagues, such as the former Homestead Grays star Buck Leonard, who played in the Mexican League from 1951 to 1955, when he was in his 40s. The 1951 bilingual contract (for $6,390) is on display.

Latino teams also played in leagues alongside Japanese players, similarly exiled from the majors, as exhibited in some saved scorecards on display from the 1954 Eagles of Mitchell, Nebraska. The mixing of cultures is celebrated in a series of vivid paintings on display from Ben Sakoguchi, depicting teams in the colorful tones of orange crate art common in the rural West.

Other art in the show includes a painting by Reynerio Tamayo in the style of a baseball card for Jose Abreu of the Chicago White Sox but protected by the Cuban patron saint. “Oh my gosh, it’s such a great painting,” Salazar-Porzio says. “It depicts how religion, and immigration and baseball are intertwined in Cuba in particular, through the story of Jose Abreu, who had to leave his 2-year-old son at the time to play in the major leagues.”

The decline of Cuban players in the majors due to political concerns opened the door for Dominican stars who have proliferated in recent years, including the trio of Red Sox stars Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Pedro Martínez.

To be sure, some of the art in the exhibition is homemade by players or their family members, leading to some unusual and singular artifacts, such as the Life magazine scrapbook assembled by Leopoldo “Polín” Martinez with posted articles about his baseball career in Mexico, California and Texas. While many stars maintained scrapbooks, pasting it in a magazine provided them with the illusion of mass publication fame that eluded so many. ...Read More

These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!

Recently: Bill Fletcher on a variety of topics... Facebook link

Also: Carl Davidson discussed Manufacturing and the Green New Deal on KPFA

Tune of the Week: 'Quasheba, Quasheba' | Rhiannon Giddens and Our Native Daughters ...6 minutes

FEB 23, 2022 - Not every television show needs to have a heroic protagonist, or even a likable protagonist. . Not every show centered around criminal characters, violent characters, unscrupulous characters is endorsing crime, violence, or the abandonment of scruples.

These should not be controversial statements this far into the age of the anti-hero, but if it seems like I’m going out of my way to make an obvious point, please know that it is because I want you, dear reader, to understand that what I’m about to say is not evidence of my feeble-minded confusion about how fiction works. There’s something I’ve been feeling for a while now, and I need to say it. Against all odds, I think that George and Bertha Russell—the robber barons—are the heroes of The Gilded Age. 

Fellowes aims his weapons-grade nostalgia on the grotesque birth of modern American empire.

The new HBO show from Julian Fellowes is essentially an across-the-pond Downton Abbey set amongst old money and new in the New York of the 1880s. And the show has imported much of Downton’s romantic longing for an idealized, bygone past. Downton, of course, was about the slow decline of the British empire and the collapse of the landed aristocracy, a process both hastened and reverently memorialized by the arrival of young people with new ideas about how to do things. It was a sometimes melancholy, sometimes whimsical—and sometimes deeply unpleasant—culture clash of a show that, despite all of its will-they-won’t-they pair-ups and redemption arcs, was ultimately about endings.

The Gilded Age, however, is about beginnings. Rather than focusing on decline, Fellowes aims his weapons-grade nostalgia on the grotesque birth of modern American empire. It’s a bizarre moment in American history to romanticize. Famously filled with corrupt politicians, ruthless monopolists, horrific economic inequality, brutal strike-breaking, and rampant racial violence, the bygone world of the Gilded Age is not nearly so bygone as the world of Downton. Nor is it really an era too often romanticized by even the rosiest of Americans themselves. It’s a period remembered mostly with shame, or, at least, as the necessary precondition for the underdog triumphalism of the Progressive Era. The very name of the Gilded Age was coined by Mark Twain to mock its vulgarity. It seems strange to conjure nostalgia for a period whose excessive inequities, as Bernie Sanders recently reminded us, so clearly mirror our own.

Fellowes has always been as invested in portraying the preposterousness of the rich as he is their ultimate humanity. And, to its credit, the show clearly understands the failings of its luridly wealthy characters. But, because the tone of this particular series is so avowedly light, it’s committed to a project of rehabilitation for nearly all of them. The threat of ruination, financial and sexual, hangs heavy over the show, but, through these first five episodes, very little bad really happens to our main characters.

Snare after snare is deftly, even improbably, side-stepped, even when the episode seems to go out of its way to worry us about them. And the most caustic and deplorable of New York’s high society are shown to have kindly humanity at their cores, even if their intentions are mislaid or the conventions of society force them into ugly acts. In one subplot, Mrs. Bauer, one of the maids of Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) accrues a massive gambling debt. Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), Van Rhijn’s Black secretary, witnesses Mrs. Bauer stealing silver from the house in order to repay her debtor. What seems almost certain to happen is that one of the white servants in the house, who’ve treated Peggy with either ambivalence or racist malice, will witness Peggy embroiled in this fiasco, accuse her, and thus ruin an innocent woman. Turns out, though, that none of that happens. A variety of characters, upstairs and downstairs, all work together and pay off Mrs. Bauer’s debts. The Gilded Age, it seems, was an age of generosity and understanding after all.

The show seems indebted to the literary aesthetic of great Gilded Age novelists like Henry James and Edith Wharton, and advance press for the series made sure to acknowledge these literary forebears. But, despite occasional dark turns, The Gilded Age has none of Wharton or James’ invigorating mercilessness. Those novelists elaborately described the sorts of interiors, domestic and psychological, we see onscreen here, but they were never this gentle. The nineteenth century New York of the American realists and naturalists was a pretty nasty place, but, over and again, the New York of Fellowes’ show simply isn’t. In this, The Gilded Age takes much the same tone as Shonda Rhimes’ Regency era romance Bridgerton—down to its fanfic approach to literary influence—when it really ought to feel more like Succession.

And that’s where we get to the Russells. Played by Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon, George and Bertha Russell are as fiercely devoted to their family as they are ruthless in business. Especially with visions of private jets, dick pics, and Italian pools still, well, swimming in our heads, it should be easy to see the Russells as the proto-Roys. The vision of capitalism dreamed up by George Russell at the end of the 19th century is the same one Logan Roy practices with precision in the 20th and 21st. But the genius of Succession is not in rendering the Roys as either the heroes or the anti-heroes of their own story, but as the villains of their own story. Their spectacular boons and betrayals make for relentless drama, but the show itself beholds them with disgust. Their food is unappetizing, their clothes aren’t stylish, their sex isn’t sexy.

The Gilded Age has chosen a different approach. While we might understand the Russells—or George at least—as world-historical villains, their show seems to perceive them as scrappy upstarts, underdogs taking on a decaying culture, the equivalent of those young people arriving at Downton Abbey with their new ideas. This is partially because the actual young people with new ideas either don’t or can’t occupy the show’s focus the way the Russells do. Marian (Louisa Jacobson) is set up as the show’s primary point-of-view character, but both the actor and her plots have a hard time holding attention. And Peggy is immersed in a variety of fascinating side-plots, but none intersect with the ballrooms and bazaars of high society that obsess Fellowes. But the Russells’ centrality isn’t only about this lack of gravitational pull elsewhere. The Gilded Age’s primary passion is its distaste for the Russells’ antagonists, and George and Bertha benefit from this targeted revulsion. ...Read More

By MARTHA MENCHACA

It shouldn’t surprise you that her research is replete with details of discrimination and disinformation—nor should it surprise you that Republican elected officials are still at it today.    

In perhaps the most harrowing section of her book, Menchaca writes of several extrajudicial killings carried out by the Texas Rangers. (The Rangers, who today represent the state’s elite criminal investigation unit, have a long but little-known history of brutality against folks who they deem to have the wrong skin color.) One of the most troubling incidents reported by Menchaca involves suspected Mexican bandidos accused of rustling cattle from King Ranch. The Rangers rounded them up, shot them, “and hung their bodies from the public square in Brownsville.” They were not given the benefit of a trial, she writes.

McNelly was admonished for his actions by the Secretary of War, but the governor of Texas did not suspend his commission. The incident caused bad feelings between the Mexican government and the State of Texas. It also alerted the U.S. government to maintain oversight of the Texas Rangers when it came to international affairs, and the War Department was put in charge of investigating all matters dealing with Texas Rangers crossing the border. After the Cachuttas affair, the U.S. government could not ignore major international incidents. Therefore, when Major John B. Jones, commander of the Frontier Battalion in El Paso County, became embroiled in the most explosive crime committed against a Mexican American community in Texas, the federal government was forced to intervene and to maintain federal surveillance over unjust state policing. President Rutherford B. Hayes began an investigation of what became known as the Salt War Riots, after federal troops reported that Texas Rangers were committing atrocities against the civilians of El Paso County and the Mexican communities across the border. ...Read More