Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Sen. Lisa Murkowski's support for voting rights legislation.
The new year brought with it a change in leadership at one of nation’s leading cross-partisan political reform organizations, as RepresentUs announced Tuesday that co-founder Joshua Graham Lynn has been elevated to CEO.
Ten years ago, Lynn and Josh Silver co-founded RepresentUs to advocate for systemic changes to the American political system. Silver had been serving as CEO, but is stepping aside to serve as executive chairman.
Lynn and his peers across the democracy reform movement have an ambitious agenda focused on voting rights, gerrymandering, election integrity and campaign finance.
“In 2012, in the wake of Citizens United, we — Josh Silver and I — recognized the urgent need to start addressing systemic reform ... and we recognized the need for an organization not focused on Democrats or Republicans but focused on bridging the ideological divide,” said Lynn.
In the ensuing decade, RepresentUs has been among the leading advocates for causes like open primaries, ranked-choice voting and ethics changes, claiming success in more than 125 instances around the country.
Lynn, who had served as president of the organization, has a background in marketing and creative services. RepresentUs, which counts numerous big-name actors and musicians among its cultural advisers, has gained national exposure through its short films and ads featuring the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Omar Epps, Ed Helms, Michael Douglas, Mark Ruffalo, and Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom.
RepresentUs and other organizations working on election and voting reform are currently supporting efforts to push a pair of bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, through the Senate. The bills have been passed by the House of Representatives but have been blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate.
“This fight is not over. There’s plenty of opportunity,” said Lynn. “We need to keep the volume turned up and keep being strategic. If we continue to be smart and use the right messengers for the right constituents — the right members of the Senate — we can move forward.”
Lynn likened the fight for federal voting reforms to “The Sixth Sense.. He believes that once the bills pass, it will be obvious that they were needed.
“Once you see it, you go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn't see it before,’” he said.
The RepresentUs leadership believes that the transition will go smoothly, thanks to the partnership between Silver and Lynn.
“Joshua Lynn has been an essential element in nearly every facet of RepresentUs’ success and has a smart vision for the future. Silver will be continuing to advise as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition,” the pair wrote in a letter.
Lynn further explained how their collaboration has been key to the organization’s success: “Josh and I have been working very closely in lockstep for the last 10 years. It’s been a great partnership. We challenge each other but it’s been very aligned.”
Lynn and the team have their work cut out for them going forward. There is an urgent need to build on their past nonpartisan victories, he said, because “what we saw in 2020 was not the end but the top of a slippery slope toward the fall of democracy.”
“We basically need to build a nonpartisan countervailing force to those who are countermanding democracy, the followers of the Big Lie,” he said.
To that end, Represent Us will look to fill strategic gaps and boost advocacy efforts where they are needed most. He pointed to the work RepresentUs has done in West Virginia to influence Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin had opposed the Democrats’ first wide-ranging election reform bill, the For the People Act, but worked with colleagues to draft a somewhat more limited version that became the Freedom to Vote Act that he hoped would attract Republican support, but so far none have signed on. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican senator to provide support for the John Lewis voting rights bill.
But Manchin and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema remain opposed to changing the filibuster rules to enable passage of the bill.
Lynn noted that ReprentUs made a heavy push in West Virginia around the Freedom to Vote Act, organizing communities of faith and military veterans, among others, to urge Manchin forward. He has high hopes that similar work — building what he says will “effectively be the largests grassroots, nonpartisan pro-democracy movement in the country” — will form the roadmap for success in 2022, 2024 and beyond.
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.