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Call It Authoritarianism |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32251"><span class="small">Zack Beauchamp, Vox</span></a>
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Sunday, 20 June 2021 08:39 |
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Beauchamp writes: "American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why."
Authoritarians. (photo: Amanda Northrop/Vox)
Call It Authoritarianism
By Zack Beauchamp, Vox
20 June 21
The Republican Party has embraced an agenda that rigs the rules in their favor. There’s a name for that behavior.
 merican democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.
Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.
It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.
It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.
There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Related
How democracy died in Hungary
Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere — using the a-word, unflinchingly — helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself.
We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents.
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday.
We’re not where Hungary is, thankfully. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.
But the playing field is indisputably tilted against them — and only growing more so. The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared.
It’s happened elsewhere. It can happen here, too.
The varieties of authoritarianism
When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism. But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive; others control their population through subtler means.
Competitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category — so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.
The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair — stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.
“Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”
Yet competitive authoritarian systems survive in part by convincing citizens that they are living in a democracy. That’s how they maintain their legitimacy and prevent popular uprisings. As such, they do not conduct the kind of obvious sham elections held in places like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (he won the 2021 contest with 95 percent of the “vote”).
In competitive authoritarianism, the opposition does have some ability to win a bit of power through, well, competition — even if the scope of their possible victories are limited.
It’s a tricky balance for the regime to pull off: rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage. Many competitive authoritarian regimes have collapsed under the stress, either transitioning to democracy (like Taiwan) or forcefully repressing the opposition and becoming a more traditional autocracy (like Belarus).
But many systems manage to survive. In a 2020 paper revisiting their work, Levitsky and Way found that 10 out of 35 competitive authoritarian regimes they identified in 2002 remained in place nearly two decades later. And new ones had emerged in countries that had previously been seen as solidly democratic — most notably Hungary, which is today one of the most effective competitive authoritarian systems in the world.
Hungary is, as it happens, one of the foreign countries most admired by American conservative intellectuals. In the 2020 paper, Levitsky and Way observe that features of its system are starting to show up in America.
“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted,” they write. “Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the Trump administration borrowed the ‘deep state’ discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“
After the events of January 6 and subsequent Republican pushes to steal the election, I reached out to Levitsky to see how his thinking had evolved.
“I’m terrified,” he told me in a phone call. “I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.”
The GOP and competitive authoritarianism
Happily, the United States still passes the most basic test of whether a system is democratic: whether the public can vote out its leaders. But it is hard to deny that the Republican Party has begun chipping away at that baseline principle, using the flaws in our political system to entrench their power.
Republicans already have unfair structural advantages, due to our outmoded Constitution. The nature of the Electoral College means that the key battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania, are considerably redder than the country as a whole. The Senate is so biased against dense urban states that under half of Americans control 82 percent of Senate seats. The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that, by one measure, the GOP has had a leg up in House elections since 1968.
The current Republican campaign builds on these inherent tendencies of the US constitutional system toward minority rule to push us toward something more properly termed authoritarian. It combines intentional state-level election rigging with the abuse of countermajoritarian institutions at the federal level to ensure GOP control of the nationwide levers of power, all the while working to delegitimize the press and other non-state institutions that could challenge it.
Some of these developments, like extreme gerrymandering and efforts to keep their supporters in a propaganda bubble insulated from nonpartisan media, are long-running. But many of the most concerning developments, ones that directly echo the approach of competitive authoritarian regimes abroad, are new.
In Hungary, one of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key power-consolidating moves was stacking the country’s election administration agency with cronies from his Fidesz party, allowing the party to more easily rig the game in its favor.
In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.
Another important Orbán tactic has been abusing regulatory policy to punish businesses that threaten the party’s hold on political power.
In 2021, the GOP embraced this idea at both the state and federal level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 presidential contender, recently signed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that levies heavy fines on platforms that ban politicians like Donald Trump. In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.
And then, of course, there’s the January 6 uprising and the Republican embrace of its fundamental premise: that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate.
All competitive authoritarian regimes need some kind of ideological justification for anti-democratic politics, something to rally its supporters against their enemies. In Hungary, it’s a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and a defense of traditional gender norms. The GOP has long employed elements of all of these but now has united around a more straightforward cause: American elections are corrupt, and Republican efforts to make elections unfair are actually efforts to fix them.
The point here is not that the GOP’s anti-democratic inclinations are completely new: In fact, they’ve evolved over decades. But the crucible of the Trump presidency and the January 6 election have forged these inchoate notions into an actual competitive authoritarian agenda.
Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie
Of course, the United States is different in many important respects from a place like Hungary. One important difference: our decentralized electoral system.
The US Constitution devolved election administration to the states, giving local legislatures control over the rules around elections and the process of actually tallying up the votes. State governments are what political scientist Phil Rocco calls “the infrastructure of democracy” — the place where the terms of political competition at the national level are set.
In theory, this should serve as a bulwark against the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, preventing one faction from rewriting the rules in their favor in one fell swoop. Historically, Rocco points out, it’s often worked the opposite way: The decentralized system enabled the creation of Jim Crow, which turned Southern states into authoritarian enclaves marked by one-party Democratic rule for decades.
“Racial apartheid in the South constructed a ‘Jim Crow Congress’; insulated from electoral competition, Southern committee chairs became the fulcrum of national policymaking — foreclosing the New Deal’s social democratic aspirations,” he writes in a 2020 essay. “Episodes of democratic collapse at the state level have had profound reverberations for national politics.”
The threat in the United States is the reemergence of this sort of bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism that has national electoral repercussions. It’s a subtle threat, one that comes into being quietly and incrementally — as is often the case when a democracy devolves into competitive authoritarianism.
“If people think that there is one day that you wake up and you’re in a competitive authoritarian system, that’s not the case,” says Hadas Aron, a political scientist at New York University who studies weak and failing democracies. “It’s actually complicated and a very, very long process.”
Experts disagree on how close we are to crossing the line. Levitsky, for example, thinks that Republicans could fatally undermine the democratic system as soon as 2024, using a combination of state-level interference with vote counts and congressional action to illegitimately block a Democratic victory.
Aron, by contrast, thinks we’re still quite far from the point of no return — that American democratic institutions are far more vibrant than their Hungarian peers were just before their collapse.
But even Aron, a longtime skeptic of the idea that America is on the path to authoritarianism, is rethinking her views in light of the GOP’s increased commitment to anti-democratic politics since January 6.
“I can’t say anything good” about Republican behavior, she tells me. “They want to stay in power and they want to change the system so it will benefit them as much as possible.”
This view is approaching a consensus among experts. A recent letter by 100 leading scholars of democracy warned that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. ... Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”
Yet many of our elected officials — including key Democrats — do not recognize the urgency of the crisis.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told Forbes last week that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it. [But] I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an op-ed justifying his decision to vote against the democracy reform bill HR 1, equated the bill with Republican efforts to undermine democracy.
“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” Manchin writes. “Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”
This is why it’s vital to be open about what’s happening — to raise the specter of authoritarianism. Because the slide toward competitive authoritarianism is incremental, it’s easy to fall into complacency, to overlook what’s happening in front of our eyes.
When I visited Hungary three years ago, I met with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament from Fidesz who left out of disgust with Orbán’s authoritarian instincts. She told me that the European Union, which has immense financial and diplomatic leverage over the Hungarian government, largely ignored the country’s authoritarian drift after it started in 2010.
“Five years later, they understood who this person was,” she told me. “But by that time, Hungary was completely changed.”
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I Have Something to Say: Is That a Problem? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Saturday, 19 June 2021 12:10 |
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Keillor writes: "It's a strange world we live in when a Pekingese wins Top Dog honors at the Westminster Dog Show, a furball beating out a whippet and a sheepdog."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
I Have Something to Say: Is That a Problem?
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
19 June 21
 t’s a strange world we live in when a Pekingese wins Top Dog honors at the Westminster Dog Show, a furball beating out a whippet and a sheepdog. I read the story twice and it said nothing about the criteria except “showmanship,” which is pretty far-fetched when referring to a lapdog, a dog designed to be a pillow. A whippet is a racer, a sheepdog herds livestock, and a Pekingese simply grows billows of hair that might be, who knows, made into wigs.
But this is the world we live in. Evidently the dog showed a lot of attitude and this impressed the judges, despite the animal’s lack of useful skills. Huskies pull the sled that brings the vaccine to the Arctic village, St. Bernards carry cannisters of warm liquids to fallen mountain climbers and assist them to safety. German shepherds guard the perimeter of the airbase and rip the throats of enemy spies attempting to steal nuclear secrets. Golden retrievers locate lost children. Border collies can be trained to carry crucial messages through a snowstorm to a distant outpost. Doberman pinschers are useful in a pinsch. A Pekingese is simply a furry stuffed dog who happens to poop.
If attitude is now the all-important quality, then Donald J. Trump will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He knows more about chemistry than all chemists put together. Ask him, he’ll tell you. About one-fourth of the country imagines he won the 2020 dog show over the Irish wolfhound who is in the White House and doing the work.
“What’s your point?” you say. “Get to the point.” I was just about to when you interrupted me. The point is that the country needs to honor competence over attitude. I say this, having come through a small but interesting medical encounter during which competence — knowing how to analyze the problem, arrive at a reasoned plan to deal with the problem, and how to describe the process to the patient — is front and center. The neurologist comes to my little ER alcove and tells me what the high-tech tests have shown and for fifteen minutes I am the focus of high-grade science and am reassured that life will go on. I admire this more than I care about his hair.
The country is in love with attitude and self-expression. I grew up when children were shushed and our parents were self-effacing, reticent to a fault, and it’s rather sweet to see the self-expression available to people today. Never mind Twitter and Instagram, think about the sheer variety of coffee cups in your cupboard today. Back in my day, we had identical beige cups we got as premiums at the gas station and now we have cups with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sayings by Thoreau, Monet’s water lilies, cartoons, nasty retorts, come-ons. A nice young woman talks to me at a party, wearing a black T-shirt that says, “I look like I’m listening but I’m waiting for someone else” and she is holding a coffee cup that says “Bad girl. Is that a problem?” Her grandmother is a friend of mine and sent her a book I wrote and she is telling me, in a vague way, that she liked it. The T-shirt and the coffee cup are only attitude accent pieces, so she won’t be taken for granted, which is fine by me, but what I really want to know is: what do you do that you care about? Seriously. What is your calling these days?
When I was Bad Girl’s age, I wore a beard, a tweed jacket, jeans, and smoked unfiltered smokes to create an intellectual air about me, but I was a fake. I used CliffsNotes to write a term paper about Moby-Dick, which I’d only read up to page 37, six pages of fake critical intelligence for which I received a B-minus, pure humbug and monkeytalk. My real education was working as a parking lot attendant at 6 a.m. winter mornings on a huge gravel lot on a bluff over the Mississippi, waving cars to park in straight lines, chasing down the freelancers and bullying them back to where they belonged. I believed in creativity but in a parking lot it creates chaos so I embraced authoritarian measures. Enlightening. I was lazy in class but discovered I was a hard worker at heart, menial jobs were up my alley, and that leads to this, writing a short essay about being real. Don’t be a Pekingese. Bring the vaccine. Find lost children.
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The Grandmother of Juneteenth on What the Holiday Means to Her |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59843"><span class="small">N. Jamiyla Chisholm, Colorlines</span></a>
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Saturday, 19 June 2021 12:08 |
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Chisholm writes: "At age 94, Ms. Opal Lee, who is lovingly called the 'Grandmother of Juneteenth,' has no time to slow down her Juneteenth activism. The native Texan, who was born in 1926, has been celebrating the holiday for decades, and pushing Congress and the White House to make it a national holiday, which President Joe Biden signed into law on July 17."
Ms. Opal Lee has been celebrating and advocating for Juneteenth since she was a child. 'We were doing Juneteenth celebrations like they were like Christmas.' (photo: Don's Photography)
The Grandmother of Juneteenth on What the Holiday Means to Her
By N. Jamiyla Chisholm, Colorlines
19 June 21
Activist, Ms. Opal Lee, talks to Colorlines about the significance of Juneteenth and why its history should never be forgotten.
t age 94, Ms. Opal Lee, who is lovingly called the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” has no time to slow down her Juneteenth activism. The native Texan, who was born in 1926, has been celebrating the holiday for decades, and pushing Congress and the White House to make it a national holiday, which President Joe Biden signed into law on July 17. Born in Marshall and raised in Fort Worth, Lee grew up commemorating June 19, 1865 every year?—?a day that many call “Emancipation Day,” as it marked the official end of slavery for African Americans in Texas?—?with community parties. Even though Texas made Juneteenth a statewide holiday in 1980, Lee and many others would like the entire nation to honor the day that celebrates the end of slavery.
In 2016, at age 90, Lee launched a walking campaign, from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness. “It’s not a Black thing. It’s not a white thing,” Lee told Blavity, in 2019. “It’s just the right thing.” Fast forward to the 2020s, and the former teacher wants everyone in the country to understand the nasty ripple effects that slavery has on everyone and to honor Juneteenth with the fanfare and recognition she believes it deserves.
Consequently, Lee has become a cause célèbre and her efforts have undoubtedly raised awareness. Last year, The New York Times profiled her efforts. The same day the story was published, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) introduced H.R.7232, Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, with overwhelming Democratic support. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) revisited the case this past February, where it passed through the Senate. Also in February, Lee was awarded Visit Fort Worth’s 2021 Hospitality Award for her activism (watch the video below). In addition to Lee’s signature Juneteenth 2.5-mile walk, she will also join musicians Pharrell Williams and H.E.R. at Variety’s Changemakers Summit, on June 17-18.
As someone who has witnessed many changes around Juneteenth over the decades?—?from Texas being the lone state that acknowledged it to a proposed Juneteenth bill now reaching the House and President Joe Biden’s desk- Lee’s advocacy represents a historical piece of the Black community’s struggle in the U.S., which is to never forget history. Lee is a living history; a national educator. Lee spoke to Colorlines about what Juneteenth means to her and why she’s fighting to make it as significant as July 4.
Ms. Opal Lee as told to Colorlines:
I tell people, we didn’t know what a white person looked like, except for the man who would come in his car to sell you linen, clothing, dishes and all that kind of stuff. There was a store at the end of our street called Miranto’s Grocery Store. And Mr. Miranto and his family didn’t look white to me so I didn’t think they were. All the people I knew in Marshall were Black. Then we moved to Fort Worth and things changed.
I learned about Juneteenth in Marshall. We were doing Juneteenth celebrations like they were like Christmas. We’d go to the fairgrounds and there would be parades, music and food and games. It was an all-day affair on the 19th day of June. I don’t remember being told why we were celebrating, but it was a glorious day.
I learned about the significance of Juneteenth when we moved to Fort Worth and I had a mentor named Lenora Rolla. Together, with others, we started the Tarrant County Black Historical & Genealogical Society. There was a group who put on the Juneteenth activities, and their idea was to make money and share it with the nonprofits. But they found it was so costly to put on the festivals that they chose not to do it anymore and the Historical Society started doing Juneteenth festivals. One of those times, we had some 30,000 people together across a three-day period, 10,000 people a day, at Sycamore Park.
It was through the Historical Society that I learned about the significance of Juneteenth. I learned that it was two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation that the enslaved in Texas found out they were free. Now, they knew it because they had what was called “watch night” services on New Year’s Eve. They had watched and waited for freedom. And when it came, a general, Gordon Granger, with maybe 7,000 Colored troops, made his way to Galveston and began to tell the troops to tell people that the enslaved were free. Gordon Granger nailed that General Order Number 3 to the door of what’s now Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston. When those people came in from their labor and somebody read that to them, they started celebrating and we’ve been celebrating ever since.
Once I learned the history of Juneteenth, I was hooked. I wanted to share it with everybody. I joined a group called the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. The Rev. Ronald Myers, who is a minister, medical doctor, and a jazz musician, is responsible for celebrations being in more than 47 of the 48 states that celebrate now. Since Texas made Juneteenth a statewide holiday in 1980, we are letting people know that we are addressing disparities. Homelessness is one of them. We work on joblessness and jobs; that two different groups could be doing the same job and get different pay. The health disparities. I can go to the hospital and get what I need but you can’t. And climate change, climate change, climate change. The scientists have told us that we need to do better than what we’re doing and I embrace this. In fact, I believe if we don’t do something about climate change, we’re all going to Hell in a hand basket.
There are also the educational components. We have something called “I’m Following You,” where we show people how to buy a home, how to straighten up their credit. We get the children of all nationalities together and they practice music for a week. Then they do a concert of the different songs they’ve learned from the different ethnic groups. The children were also given 12 freedoms gained. When the enslaved were freed, they gained the opportunity to learn to read and write. They were free to name themselves. They were free to not let their children be taken from them. They were free to buy property. Twelve freedoms they gained and 12 is what was given to the 800 children who then created drawings about these freedoms.
We also don’t want people to think it’s a Black thing, or a Texas thing because it’s not. None of us are free until we’re all free. And we aren’t free yet.
They’re just too many disparities. Last September, we took 1.5 million signatures to Congress and we proposed taking another million signatories to them this Juneteenth. Each one of us could be a part by going to Opalswalk2dc.com and giving us the signatures that we need. Congress are the busiest cats on the Hot Tin Roof cover and we don’t need them to put Juneteenth to the back burner. If we have to do Juneteenth every day of the cotton picking year, we have got to get this bill passed. And we almost had something going with Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who called for a vote in the Senate [last year]. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) proposed discarding Columbus Day and having Juneteenth instead and it didn’t pass, when he could have gone along with Cornyn, making it unanimous in the Senate, he dissented instead. Well, I was at the press conference in the spring, and Cornyn authored another bill to have Juneteenth made into a national holiday, as did Sheila Jackson Lee, which are the two bills we’re pushing. Everyone needs to let their Congress people know that they, too, want Juneteenth to be a national holiday and that it’s not just one little old lady in tennis shoes running around talking about Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is a bridge that should be celebrated from the 19th to the Fourth of July. And we weren’t free on the Fourth of July. So if you’re going to celebrate freedom, let it be celebrated for everybody. Then, let’s address the things that need to be addressed, together.
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Let's Rebuild the US Jaguar Population - Yes, Jaguars |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59841"><span class="small">Eric W. Sanderson, Scientific American</span></a>
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Saturday, 19 June 2021 12:05 |
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Sanderson writes: "On a chilly January morning in 1964, Russell Culbreath, a U.S. government hunter, trapped a jaguar on the broken hills above the Black River, on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona."
A jaguar. (photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)
Let's Rebuild the US Jaguar Population - Yes, Jaguars
By Eric W. Sanderson, Scientific American
19 June 21
Most Americans are probably surprised that we still share a country with these magnificent big cats. But they need help to survive
 n a chilly January morning in 1964, Russell Culbreath, a U.S. government hunter, trapped a jaguar on the broken hills above the Black River, on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. In pictures that appeared in local papers shortly thereafter, Culbreath was shown cradling the head of the sagging corpse. After a few days on display at Fort Apache, the cat was skinned, its skull and remains sent back to a museum in Washington, D.C. As far as we know, this was the last jaguar to inhabit the mountains north of Tucson.
Nearly six decades later, there is an opportunity to bring America’s great cat back to the United States for good.
When they think of jaguars at all, many Americans probably think first of football players in Florida or luxury cars from England, but the jaguar Culbreath slew was a gorgeously patterned, heavily-muscled feline, cousin to the lion, leopard and tiger. While many of its American cousins live in the Amazonian rainforest, this jaguar and his kin had inhabited the dry cedar breaks and rugged pine-oak woodlands of the American Southwest for centuries.
Proof of jaguars in North America is ample. In the 19th century, Texas Rangers shot one north of San Antonio. Sam Houston proudly wore a vest made out of jaguar skin. Harder-to-believe but nonetheless intriguing observations come from California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Louisiana—and even Virginia and North Carolina.
The historical evidence for jaguars is strongest in Arizona and New Mexico, especially in the ancestral homelands of the Apache, Yavapai, Tohono O’odham, Pueblos, Hopi, Navajo and Zuni peoples. As the Arizona Territory was settled, Americans hunted jaguars in the mountains north of Tucson to the Grand Canyon, east of the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, and in the “sky island” ranges south to the international border. Ranchers shot and poisoned jaguars, along with Mexican wolves and other predators, to protect livestock that the arid terrain didn’t kill first.
When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) first listed jaguars on the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1972, they were protected only in Central and South America. Court cases and scientific papers encouraged a more expansive view.
Policy about jaguars swayed back and forth between dismissive and supportive, depending on who was in charge in Washington. But the arguments were mostly theoretical: jaguars, always elusive and magnificently camouflaged, were practically nonexistent north of the human line that demarcated the U.S. and Mexico.
That changed in 1996, when a rancher hunting for mountain lions found himself face-to-face with a jaguar in Arizona’s Peloncillo Mountains. Warner Glenn’s photographs of an unmistakable jaguar in unmistakably arid terrain intensified interest in the species. They were the first photographs of a live jaguar ever taken in the U.S. He later wrote movingly of the “eyes of fire” of that utterly self-possessed cat.
Over the last two decades, motion-sensitive camera traps have photographed other jaguars in the mountains south of Interstate 10, including pictures taken as recent as March of this year. For some, such as the USFWS, I-10 has been taken as the natural northern boundary of jaguars in the Americas, despite the historical records to the contrary and even though the road wasn’t built until 1956.
The detection of jaguars in the United States excited the public and generated a flurry of scientific activity. Over the last 25 years, researchers created nine models to predict the species’ potential distribution in Arizona and New Mexico, using a variety of different inputs, techniques and starting presumptions. My colleagues and I contributed three additional models, including extending the service’s own habitat model north of I-10, to show that jaguars potentially could find enough prey, water, cover and freedom in the central mountain ranges of these two states, between Flagstaff, Ariz., and Silver City, N.M.
This block of suitable habitat is vast, over 20 million acres, an area the size of the entire state of South Carolina. The U.S. Forest Service manages most of this land (68 percent) for the public good, including the health, diversity and productivity of its ecosystems, with several declared wilderness areas. Native American tribes, which have sovereign rights to manage wildlife on their lands, care for another 13 percent.
Before our work, the best available science was that the U.S. could only harbor six jaguars south of I-10. After our work, the new estimate is 90–150 jaguars, a potentially self-sustaining population.
But the jaguar needs our help. Habitat destruction, transportation infrastructure, natural constrictions in the landscape and the border’s walls and barriers mean that natural reestablishment of female jaguars from source populations in Mexico 300 miles north to central Arizona and New Mexico is unlikely. A more active approach is needed. Jaguars have been successfully reintroduced to lost range in Brazil and Argentina, and the same could happen here.
Russell Culbreath did a terrible thing, but he was not a villain. It is said that late in life he regretted killing that male on the breaks. Rather, the death of this jaguar is a symbol of the injustices that Americans have meted out to wildlife for over 400 years.
We have forgotten how to live in a respectful and reciprocal relationship with our wild relations. Our forefathers destroyed habitat and took the lives of millions of creatures with hardly a second thought, impoverishing our native fauna, undermining fragile ecosystems and diminishing us all in the process.
But we can make amends. Many Americans in the 21st century want to make amends. Nature is ready, as always, to help and to heal. Let us begin with justice for the jaguar, America’s great cat.
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he unprecedented global challenges that the United States faces today—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, terrorism, corruption, authoritarianism—are shared global challenges. They cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. They require increased international cooperation—including with China, the most populous country on earth.
