Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, is an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States.
Terrell and her husband, Rob Richie. helped to found FairVote — a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy and voting system reform in the United States and has helped parliamentarians around the globe meet United Nations goals for women’s representation and leadership.
She has worked as campaign manager and field director for candidates for the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and governor. She has also been involved in state and city-wide initiative efforts, including a state equal rights amendment.
In 2024 Terrell was named one of Washington, D.C.’s top policy experts and received a Generational Impact Award for her work on voting system reform. Terrell is a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory and was named a Brewer fellow along with a cohort of leaders in the democracy reform movement. She has a chapter on women and the presidency in the 2020 volume of “ The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.”
Terrell writes a weekly column on women’s representation for Ms. Magazine and has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Refinery29, The Nation, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The American Prospect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Christian Science Monitor. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and has participated in numerous radio shows, podcasts and panel discussions on the topics of electoral reform and systems strategies to advance women’s representation and leadership.
Terrell is an avid knitter and gardener, has three children, and is active in local politics and in the Quaker community. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1986.
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Terrell for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.