The Lede

The Meaning of the Midterms — with Robert Evans and Lydia Wilson

As the first nationwide elections since the January 6 Capitol attacks, America’s 2022 midterms were something of a test for the country’s troubled democracy. Americans went to the polls in the shadow of a year of turbulence and rising political violence. With the votes still being counted, journalist Robert Evans joined New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson to try to make sense of the results. “The last time we had a midterm election that went this well for the party in the White House was 2002, in the immediate wake of 9/11,” he explains. Few expected such a successful showing for the Democrats. Between the nation’s economic woes and Joe Biden’s struggling approval ratings, conventional wisdom predicted a “red wave.” But predictions of Republican revanchism turned out to be greatly exaggerated. High youth turnout meant that progressive candidates like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman performed much better than had been predicted, while the increasingly extreme rhetoric of many Republican candidates proved alienating. “The thing that we couldn't have known was the degree to which voters were going to react against the power grabs that the right has made,” says Evans. “And I'm happy to say that it does look like that's one of the stories from last night.” But what that rejection means for the increasingly violent climate of American politics remains to be seen. A recent YouGov poll found that nearly 40% of Americans believe the country is heading for civil war. “I'm still very worried about how hot the temperature has gotten, and how deeply angry American politics still is,” Evans remarks. “The fact that maybe they're not going to continue to win elections doesn't mean that they're not going to keep getting angrier.” “Americans do have a pretty long, proud tradition of murdering each other over politics,” he adds. “The worst thing you can do is assume this terrible thing could never happen here because we're somehow special.”

Deciphering the Deep State — with Josef Burton and Joshua Martin

“This BMW gets hit by a truck in the Aegean region,” explains former U.S. diplomat Josef Burton. “And driving it are a Kurdish clan leader, a police general and a far-right mafia drug baron. And the trunk is just full of Deutschmarks and silenced submachine guns.” The incident caused a major scandal in Turkey, and subsequent parliamentary investigations revealed the existence of a rogue network of intelligence officials, army officers, mafiosos and ultranationalists. Implicated in hundreds of killings over several decades, it was this network that the term “deep state” was coined to describe. “This wasn’t just state repression,” Burton tells New Lines Magazine's Joshua Martin. “The idea of the deep state is that there's elements within the state which are just doing what they want, without any going back to the chain of command. They're just doing it.” For Americans, though, the term has taken on very different connotations. “The meaning shifted between this very specific historical phenomenon to any structure of power you don’t like,” Burton says. It became heavily associated with former President Donald Trump, who uses it to denigrate his political opponents and encourages his supporters to do the same — particularly in the months since August’s FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. “It really raises the temperature,” says Burton. “The more unhinged and irrational these sorts of terms become, I think the more we have to point to concrete historical examples of this defined thing,” he adds. Produced by Joshua Martin

How Strongmen Crush Democracies — with Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Faisal Al Yafai

Since the turn of the century, the global tide of democracy has begun to recede. Men like Putin in Russia, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and of course Trump in the United States have all sought to subvert their countries’ institutions and consolidate their own authoritarian rule. “These men have similar personalities,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “They're ruthless. They have no moral code. They are opportunistic. They will be whatever the public needs them to be at that moment.” Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian fascism at New York University, watched their rise with a combination of horror and recognition. In her book, “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” she compares the men behind the current wave of autocratization to their counterparts from the 1930s and the Cold War. “The way they get to power changes over 100 years. But the net effect of what they do is much the same.” She believes there are two main things that define a “strongman”. The first is personalist rule. “These are people who come to power and organize the state around their personal obsessions and needs,” she explains. The second is their appeal to masculinity — “all strong men use machismo as a way of legitimizing themselves.” This, she says, is the reason Putin is so often photographed shirtless and why Trump brags about his sexual prowess. This emphasis on masculinity is why most strongmen tend to be just that — men. But the recent election of far-right populist Giorgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy complicates that picture. “She is actually a strongwoman,” Ben-Ghiat says. “The first one we've had.” Produced by Joshua Martin

Breaking News, Breaking Taboos — with Karl Sharro and Faisal Al Yafai

The U.K. has had months of political chaos, with Liz Truss not even the first British prime minister to resign this year. In June, MPs began to realize that the only way to rid themselves of the scandal-prone Boris Johnson was to force him out of office. Johnson refused as long as he could manage. For satirist and architect Karl Sharro, recalling the many long revolts against British colonialism over the 20th century, the irony was too delicious to ignore: “It's great that the British are discovering how difficult it is to get rid of British rule,” he tweeted. Sharro’s absurdist humor is aimed at many targets – corrupt politicians and soccer referees among them – but perhaps at the media above all. His observations have resonated widely with those frustrated by patronizing international news coverage, even earning him a book deal — “And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News.’” “It’s just a way of poking fun at certain Western narratives and attitudes,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. It’s something that occasionally gets him into trouble with those who don’t see the funny side. He argues that ”secular taboos” are emerging, stifling creativity and leaving humorists like him with little room for error. “And these sorts of things — you go talk to anyone from a Middle Eastern or Arab background, and these are things you struggle against all your life,” he says. “You struggle against societal norms and restrictions, family norms and restrictions, authoritarian norms and restrictions. You want to be consistent with yourself, you want to say these transgressions should be dealt with through a freer form of critique.” He’s uncomfortable with the idea that any topic should be decisively off-limits: “You can joke about anything; it depends how you do it.” He reserves particular ire for those Westerners who were happy to laugh at his tweets about the Middle East but who failed to see the joke when it landed closer to home. Sharro has greeted the “general sense of dysfunction creeping in the West” with both anger and unabashed schadenfreude, despite living in the U.K. himself. “The collapse of the country has been very rewarding for me personally, in whatever comedic capacity I have,” he remarks.

History’s Long Afterlife — with Priyamvada Gopal and Lydia Wilson

The question of how the past is remembered will always be unavoidable. But in recent years, it has loomed particularly large and proved particularly contested. These “memory wars” are fought so hard and argued so passionately because, ultimately, they’re battles for control of the narrative. How we remember the past determines who we believe ourselves to be. “There is actually no way to understand who we are and how we think about each other and how we think about our relationship to the world without thinking about history,” says author and academic Priyamvada Gopal. In this conversation with New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson, she argues that we never really leave the past. “I tend to use the word ‘afterlife’ rather than ‘the past,’ because I think that things that have happened in history have a life in the present. It’s ongoing.” Such disputes over history are shaping politics the world over. In the U.K., the death of Queen Elizabeth II has brought to the surface fierce disputes over the darker chapters of British history. Likewise, many of the Commonwealth countries for whom the British monarch is still head of state are now reassessing their relationships with the crown. Conversely, in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has promoted a belligerent and exclusionary reinterpretation of India's past — and wielded the power of the state to suppress competing narratives. "Muslims are a deeply endangered community in India because of this mythology," Gopal explains. "Myths are not innocent." Produced by Joshua Martin

Moscow in Exile — with Julia Ioffe and Amie Ferris-Rotman

Seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization order has sent shockwaves through a society that had previously still been able to ignore the fighting. “If you were in Moscow this past summer, you wouldn’t know that Russia was fighting a costly, bloody and totally unnecessary war in Ukraine,” Russian-American journalist and author Julia Ioffe tells New Lines Magazine's Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It was easy for Russians to push it off to the edge of their minds, but now it has come home to them.” As security forces battle protests across Russia, about 700,000 Russians are estimated to have fled the country. Traffic jams at border checkpoints, Ioffe explains, have been visible from space. “When they’re asked to actively participate in the war and asked to go into the trenches themselves, they don’t want to take part in it.” For Ioffe, watching Russia’s civil society implode since the invasion has been particularly painful because of her ties to the country — and to Moscow especially. “It was my favorite city in the world,” she says. But now, its once-vibrant society has been driven into exile by the regime. “How long will it take to rebuild a new Moscow, a new Russia, after this one collapses?” But, she adds, it’s nothing compared with what was done to Mariupol and other cities across Ukraine. Produced by Joshua Martin

How Nomads Changed the World — with Anthony Sattin and Faisal Al Yafai

For thousands of years, most humans were nomads, living their lives on the move. They were raiders and traders, herder and hunters — and conquerors. From Genghis Khan to Osman I, nomads changed the course of history on countless occasions. And yet, says historian and travel writer Anthony Sattin, we still tend to underestimate their influence on history. “Our histories glorify people who build monuments,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “We don’t tend to value tribes in the Amazon, for instance, who didn’t chop down their forests, who maintained an equilibrium and flourished without disturbing the ecological balance in their world.” Plenty of nomad cultures have been literate, but on the whole, most of the societies keeping substantial written records were sedentary societies. Traditionally confined by historians to anecdotes and afterthoughts, oral histories recently have been recognized as just as useful as written histories for reconstructing the past. “The stories are still being told, but the research hasn’t been done,” says Sattin. Those past biases come at a huge cost to our understanding of history, Sattin says: “I don’t think we can know who we’re going to become unless we know who we were, and half of our story is missing, because for most human history nomads have been half of our story, and yet they’re not in our books.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

Can Africa Solve Ethiopia’s War? — with Chris Maroleng, Adeoye Akinola, Tedla Asfaw & Kwangu Liwewe

For two years, Ethiopia has been caught in the grip of a war between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who control the country’s northernmost state. As the power struggle polarized the country along ethnic lines, the number of mass killings and other atrocities led one Ethiopian general to dub it a “very dirty war.” An agreement in March led to a truce, but after five months, fighting was reignited on Aug. 24. Yet hope for a lasting peace may not yet be lost. “Initially, the Tigrayans insisted that they were not going to be part of the peace process,” Dr. Adeoye Akinola tells New Lines Magazine's Kwangu Liwewe. But thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the African Union (AU), both the federal government and the TPLF have agreed to allow the international organization to mediate negotiations between the warring factions. As the United Nations convenes in New York, Ethiopians are watching closely in the hope that diplomacy can triumph. “We cannot hide from this,” says Tedla Asfaw. “We have to face it.” But with neighboring Eritrea, a government ally, launching a new offensive into Tigray, the conflict looks as if it may descend once more into total war. “Whether it’s the AU or the United Nations,” says analyst Chris Maroleng, “It’s quite clear that what is actually required is a reformation of not just the institutions, but the manner in which politics is carried out in Ethiopia.” Produced by Joshua Martin

Moon Knight Rises — with Hayat Aljowaily, Ola Salem and Anthony Elghossain

Producer and screenwriter Hayat Aljowaily joins New Lines Magazine's Ola Salem and Anthony Elghossain to talk about cinema, identity and the making of Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” The Emmy-nominated show stars Oscar Isaac as the titular protagonist, a man with dissociative identity disorder who finds himself sharing a body with a mercenary battling Egyptian gods. “Portraying Egypt accurately was really at the core of what we were trying to achieve,” explains Aljowaily. With much of the action taking place in the country, the creators were determined to avoid the usual cliches. “That meant not going to shoot in Morocco and pretend that it’s Egypt, because then it’s not going to look like Egypt. And so we built Egypt.” The crew started with a vast empty set in Budapest and set to work. “And within two weeks, it was Cairo.” But perhaps the biggest responsibility of all was the portrayal of the protagonist’s love interest, Layla, the first female Arab superhero to appear on television. “It was a big responsibility to create Layla, because we knew how important it was to young Arab women — to Arab women, period.” “Having her was such a game changer,” adds Ola. “Just having someone with curly hair, that kind of resembles you, and you kind of can see yourself in, is such a big deal.”

After Queen Elizabeth II — with Lydia Wilson, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Kwangu Liwewe

Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, has died. For 70 years, the queen was a fixture in the national life of Britain and indeed the wider world. The world changed immeasurably in the decades since she came to the throne in 1952. The country when she first ruled was quite unlike the one she died in. She inherited not merely a country but an empire and presided over its dissolution. Although her death was expected, as the ritual of its declaration demonstrated, it still leaves the country in a deeply uncertain state — an uncertainty that extends to the 14 other countries in which she was the head of state as well as the wider Commonwealth. As the crown passes to her son, Charles III, New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai speaks to Lydia Wilson outside Buckingham Palace and talks to Amie Ferris Rotman and Kwangu Liwewe about what the passing of such a consequential figure may mean for the world. Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy