Friends like these. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, don’t usually issue news releases about the deals they make—but it seems they’ve been making more and more of them. Western intelligence officials said in September that Iran had sent about 200 ballistic missiles to Russia. They worried that in return, Moscow might be ready to share secrets for making a nuclear bomb with Tehran. Iran has also provided the Kremlin with thousands of drones for the war in Ukraine.

These deals belong to a pattern of closer ties among Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea: North Korea has given Russia more than a million artillery shells; Russia reportedly built a drone factory in China; and China now says it supports Iran in the widening conflict in the Middle East. What’s happening here? Today, Lucan Way looks at how the increasing collaboration among the world’s most powerful autocracies is grounded in Russia’s war on Ukraine—and at what this collaboration means for the world’s democracies.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘The Soldier.’ Lara Rix-Martin, a British ambient and experimental keyboard ace, records as Meemo Comma. Last month, she released a new album, Decimation of I, inspired by a 1972 Soviet science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic. To say this track is haunted may not fully capture the mood.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: The Hollow Parties. As the U.S. presidential election on November 5 nears, Americans face a choice between two candidates whose paths to the top of their parties seem super-divergent: Donald Trump took over the Republican Party from the outside, serially knocking out established candidates in the 2016 primaries; Kamala Harris rose through the Democratic Party before Joe Biden picked her to be his running mate in 2020 (despite her failure to run a competitive primary campaign herself). The rest is recent history.

These different paths might seem to represent the essence of what separates the two parties’ current identities: the former outsider and disruptor vs. the consummate insider and defender of the establishment.

But as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld illustrate in their recent book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, the different paths also illustrate a transformation common to both parties.

Schlozman and Rosenfeld show how, over the past half-century, both major parties have lost what previously defined them—their roots in American civic life. Previously, the parties had lively local branches across the whole country, where party members would come together to organize local political initiatives—be it housing policy or reforms to trash collection—but now, they serve that function less and less. Now, the parties themselves don’t mobilize voters or fundraise for political campaigns; that’s mostly left to organizations aligned with the parties but not controlled by them.

This transformation enabled Trump's rise, Schlozman and Rosenfeld write. The Republican Party’s hollowness, as they say, meant its leadership couldn't control its base as it had in the past. And the Democratic Party’s hollowness has left it largely immobilized, splintered by competing internal factions that struggle to come together in the pursuit of common goals—which, paradoxically, has strengthened the party’s leadership at the expense of its rank and file.

This book was published before Harris became the Democratic nominee; but as Schlozman and Rosenfeld have said since, the Democrats’ months of passivity about Biden’s faltering campaign—followed by their suppression of any competition to succeeded him—is only symptomatic of the same hollowness.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Choir Waits in the Wings.’ The Chicago post-rock deity David Grubbs is back with a record blending his instrumental prowess with the guitarist Loren Connors’s. Together, they build anticipation and tension with piano, guitar, and what sounds like a cavernous room to record in—all atmosphere.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Night in Tunisia. President Kais Saied was re-elected to a second five-year term in Tunisia on October 6. But the election was largely a sham: Saied won around 91 percent of the vote, but his main challenger had been jailed during the campaign and sentenced to 12 years in prison for allegedly falsifying election documents. The country’s election authority—under Saied’s control—disqualified more than a dozen other candidates. Officially, fewer than 28 percent of Tunisians even turned out to vote—though the government refused to allow independent election observers to monitor the balloting, so who knows.

Back in 2019, Saied was elected in free and fair elections, but in 2021 he dissolved Parliament and has ruled by decree since, turning Tunisia squarely into an autocracy—using his powers to undermine the country’s institutions, replacing judges and all regional governors with people loyal to him.

Notably, Tunisia is where the anti-regime Arab Spring began in late 2010, after a fruit vendor in a small town immolated himself to protest his treatment by local officials. The revolution there ignited uprisings across the Arab world, eventually toppling dictators in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen—and sparking a civil war in Syria that continues today. Longtime tyrants later fell in Sudan and Algeria. But all these countries have variously gone back to autocratic rule. Why couldn’t democracy take root in the Arab Middle East and North Africa?

In September 2021, shortly after Saied disbanded Parliament and declared an indefinite state of emergency, Michele Dunne explored the problems Arab countries faced after their dictators fell.

For Dunne, two key factors thwarted their hopes for transitions to democracy: Regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. quickly moved to undermine them, while the United States and other Western democracies largely stood by without giving them much help.

—Michael Bluhm

Hamstrung and unpopular in Paris and Berlin. France looks set to pull a new government together—but it’s a minority cabinet that’ll have to rely on the populist-right party National Rally to stay in operation. Germany’s chancellor is his country’s most unpopular leader in more than 30 years, as members of his government bicker with one another in the media over why they can’t get things done. And Bulgaria’s governments keep collapsing. What’s the problem? Today, Matthias Matthijs explores an emerging set of overlapping political crises in Europe—and how the rise of so many new parties generally is ultimately supporting the rise of the nationalist right specifically.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Lose the Minus.’ In 1994, London’s Seefeel became the first guitar band to sign to Warp Records—home of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. Back now from a 13-year hiatus with a new album, Everything Squared, this track is just a bass line and some shimmering guitar, drenched in reverb. Sarah Peacock’s vocal tones are like mood lighting.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Foreign Agents. Elected in 2021 promising to fight crime, Eric Adams became this September the first-ever mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. Prosecutors say Adams took luxury travel perks and illicit political contributions from Turkish officials—which he then used to extract some further US$10 million for his mayoral campaign from the city’s coffers via its matching-funds system. Enterprising stuff.

As a news item, “corrupt politician” might seem unremarkable, but Adams is only the most recent, glaring case. The former Democratic senator from New Jersey Bob Menendez chaired the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee until last year, when he was indicted for having conveyed sensitive information to the Egyptian government in exchange for envelopes stuffed with cash.

The incompetency of these recent operations is striking: Adams’s people kept theirs going even when they knew they were being watched. When his Turkish contact instructed him to delete their text messages, he promised he would. Perhaps he had a lot on his mind. After Egyptian officials presented Menendez with several bars of gold, he look up their value on Google—repeatedly.

What may be more striking, though, is where the money is coming from: Turkey and Egypt are both countries dominated by single parties, commanded by long-ruling strongmen, who extract and use their countries’ wealth with impunity—not least to develop influence abroad. What’s the extent of that problem?

Much of the answer, it seems, has little to do with self-exposure to criminal prosecution, Adams- or Menendez-style. As Casey Michel shows in his new book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, there’s a whole legion of lobbyists in Washington working to influence American politics on behalf of kleptocratic states. There’s also no obvious limit of erstwhile congressmen and generals willing to take enormous sums from them, after their time in the government or military, to broker relationships. And that, for the most part, is perfectly legal.

—Gustav Jönsson

Leave it to the authorities. Experts have long played a prominent role in American governance. A century ago, H.L. Mencken noted that New York City employed so many types of experts that it had now put several "general experts" on the payroll.

The trend toward greater specialization has only continued since. Political leaders have become increasingly reliant on policy experts—but meanwhile, these experts have become increasingly political. Whether it’s on climate change or epidemiology, or matters of social justice, experts—leaning on their credentials—now routinely pronounce on politically contentious issues, even issues they’re not experts on. Why is this?

Today, David A. Hopkins explores the question in the context of the sharp decline in trust toward public-policy experts on the American right—and the growing political divide along educational lines in American society as a whole.

—Gustav Jönsson