This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
We increasingly feel as though we’re in the scenario I’ve been worried about since the moment Charlie Kirk was shot: where his death, his assassination, is used by those in power to excuse a crackdown on those they have already seen themselves at war with.
Archived clip of JD Vance: You have the crazies on the far left who are saying: Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no. We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence. That’s not OK. Violence is not OK in our system.
Archived clip of Stephen Miller: It is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, homeland security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
I think it’s a very dangerous moment. But it’s not inevitable. Leadership is always a choice. You can choose to use a moment like this to deepen our divisions, to pull us apart from one another, to make politics into something yet that much closer to war. Or you can use a moment like this to reduce those divisions — to try to take the country in a different direction than the one in which we’ve been going.
We have had, over the past week and change, an example of that latter kind of leadership, too. Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. The governor of Utah is Spencer Cox, a Republican, a conservative — one who is very concerned about the ways we’ve been coming apart as a country.
He didn’t come to this only on that day. For years now, he has been thinking about political de-escalation, thinking about the ways in which we disagree with one another and how we can do it in a way that does not tear us apart.
So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about what that day, that week, was like for him, what it has left him thinking about and what he thinks we should do now.
Ezra Klein: Governor Cox, welcome to the show.
Spencer Cox: Thanks for having me, Ezra.
So I want to start in 2023. You said back then that you felt we were “facing a toxic debate unlike anything that we’ve seen since the Civil War.” What were you seeing then that made you say that?
I was taking over as chair of the National Governors Association, and as chair, you get to do an initiative — everybody gets to do something. And I was looking at health care cost escalation. I was looking at critical minerals and energy production. And we had this conversation with my team and just decided that we couldn’t solve any of the biggest problems facing our country if we all hated each other.
One of my team members had this idea: What if we focused on toxic polarization as our initiative for the N.G.A. — spend a year working with experts across the country trying to figure out if there’s real research around how we could de-escalate what was happening?
In one of those first convenings, we were in New Hampshire, on a college campus, and we had an expert who came in from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who had done some research around this type of political violence that we were seeing in our country.
The report came back that we were kind of blowing through all those checkpoints toward some very serious division, the potential for a catastrophic decline in Western civilization and a serious increase in political violence. It just led us to believe that we were on the cusp of something pretty dark.
When you did that research, when you spoke to those experts, what were the kinds of conditions that revealed themselves to you as dangerous? What were the checkpoints that people worried about that you saw us breaching?
A lot of it has to do with the way we talk about each other in our politics, the rhetoric that we were seeing from elected officials. It’s the inability to accomplish big things, the lack of civility that we’re seeing — and I kind of don’t like the term “civility” anymore because we think civility means a kind of holding hands and kumbaya. It’s something much deeper than that.
It was the threats that we were seeing in our language. The rhetoric we were seeing that we were seeing from elected officials. And then we found that there was a measurable increase in threats of political violence to members of Congress in less than a decade. Threats against judges had doubled. Attempted assassinations that we had seen, the different types of shootings. The rise of illiberalism, I guess, for lack of a better term, but the rejection of Western norms of free speech — for example, campus protests. And, of course, coming out of 2020. Jan. 6 and George Floyd, the riots that we had seen in the streets during 2020 — all of those things combined for a kind of tinderbox when it comes to our body politic.
So that was something you had begun to think about at least as early as 2023. I want to move us into the present. Talk me through Sept. 10, the day Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. What was that day like for you? What happened?
It started out like any other day: I had a couple of events. I had driven to a small town in Utah called Mona, where we talked to telecommunications providers, and then came back. And I was actually having lunch with my staff — we have a quarterly birthday lunch, and it was my quarter. I had a birthday in July, and we were really excited.
I had just gotten my plate of food to sit down when my assistant came and grabbed me and said: I need you immediately. We had a captain and a lieutenant from my highway patrol who told me that Mr. Kirk had been shot.
And I couldn’t believe it. I knew he was in town. I knew he was on campus. And I said: Are you sure? Because as a governor, you learn pretty quickly that there’s a fog of war when it comes to these types of events — you really can’t trust any information you get early on.
And then, 30 seconds later, I have the White House on the phone. They’ve called me, and they want information. Actually, it was Secretary Marco Rubio who was in the Situation Room for something else, who was there. I have a great relationship with him. He called, and from there it was just: How do we get the right information? Were other people shot and injured? Which hospital is he at? What is his condition?
The initial report I got was that he was awake and responsive — and that, of course, was not true. So I said: Look, I need one of our people at the hospital so that we have the right information.
And then I get a condition “delta,” which is not great. And then a few minutes later: “fatal.” Then I called the White House to inform them what had happened. And then just trying to figure out: Who is this? We have a suspect in custody, but that’s not the guy. And now we’re chasing what? What do we know? Did anybody see anything? Is there any video?
Everybody wants information, and no one has any information. That’s the hardest part because then people start to make up information and try to figure out what’s real, what’s not.
And then you’re dealing with: Well, who’s in charge? You have the campus police department, you have the county sheriff, you have the state, you have the F.B.I. and the feds who are coming in — who’s taking the lead? Who’s got what assignment? And just trying to organize all that in real time is something.
Look, the governor before me — I was lieutenant governor — did not leave me a handbook explaining how to deal with a political assassination. It has never happened here. We’re just making it up as we go along.
What were your first thoughts, when you knew Kirk had died, about what it meant for the country — and about what it meant for our politics?
Well, my first thoughts were certainly for his wife and kids. In that moment, in every moment, he’s a dad and a husband, first and foremost. And that’s kind of the sickening pit in the stomach.
The second one is — and by the way, every governor does this — you worry about your state. Like: Oh my gosh, how could this happen here?
Especially because we really pride ourselves on trying to be a little different and trying to be the type of people who are peacemakers. We lead the nation in service every year, we lead the nation in charitable giving. It’s kind of part of our brand and our DNA and who we are. And you’re like: Please, just not here. How could this happen here?
I think the thing that really hit me so quickly — and I don’t think it hit for a lot of people who were dealing with this here in Utah — was what this actually meant in a bigger picture. This wasn’t a local shooting or something that impacts us. This was much, much bigger. Both because I now have the president of the United States on the phone with me within an hour — that’s different than anything else, right?
But also, just what this means culturally. And as somebody who has been working on this for many years, understanding that this is something different. I guess the president getting shot, President Trump — the attempted assassination — would have been the same, but he survived that. But this is a big one.
You have to go back a long time in our nation’s history for something of this magnitude, for a large segment of the population who held him in a very specific light.
In 2020, I published my first book, which is called “Why We’re Polarized.” And the final paragraphs of that book are this argument that I make about realism: that as polarized and as divided as things feel — I mean, you can look back in our history and see much worse. Not just the Civil War, but look back at the 1960s — look at the political violence, the assassinations, the violence in the streets. We are in so much better of a place today than we were then.
And I’ve been thinking in the last few days that when I was on the tour for that book, one of the things I kept saying was that my nightmare scenario is something like the ’60s but with today’s hyperpolarized parties, hyperpolarized media, hyperpolarized social media.
And as I’ve watched the rise in political violence — the attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and then the assault on her husband, the attempted firebombing of Josh Shapiro’s residence, the attempted assassination of President Trump, the assassination of the former speaker of the Minnesota House and now of Kirk — it’s knowing it’s coming into this context.
And when I saw Kirk had died, I just remember my stomach sinking and the future going foggy. Because we’re not well equipped for this right now.
That dark pit in your stomach — I’m glad you said that, because that was one of the first feelings I had. This wave of nausea kind of washes over you. And if you didn’t feel something like that — regardless of your politics — then I do believe there’s something broken inside of us when we don’t feel that.
And, again, understanding there are a lot of people out there who disagree vehemently with maybe everything that Charlie Kirk said — although I suspect if you heard everything he said, you would probably find some things that you agreed with. But that is part of the issue.
And you’re right. I mentioned in one of my press conferences, after a question, that the ’60s are important to go back to. In fact, I’ve actually, in the last couple days, been trying to look for the definitive piece on how we got out of 1969 into the ’70s. What was the offramp there? And I’m not sure I found that definitive piece yet.
But you are also right, and I think this is so critical: to understand the differences between then and now, and the way we get our information and consume our information and share our innermost thoughts and feelings with one another in such rapid succession, and the way the algorithms, especially, steal our agency and addict us to them and show us the worst of humanity to get us that dopamine hit from outrage — that is very different.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, you had to go turn on a television and watch breaking news. Other political assassinations were not caught on tape, so you don’t have tape of that. Martin Luther King Jr. is an example of that.
It was not being looped on social media in front of everybody over and over and over again.
Yes, in a way that desensitizes us, in a way that we should not be capable of processing.
So if you take that hate and divisiveness and polarization of the ’60s and implant it into today’s different culture and media culture and polarization, it’s a recipe for something, I believe, far more worse than that. And that’s exactly why you and I, on very different ends of the political spectrum, had that same pit in our stomachs.
Over those next few days after the shooting, I think everyone was desperate to know who the killer was and why they did it. I had so many private conversations with people in which they would say to me something like: I just hope he’s not — or she’s not — but I think people assumed it was a man — X, where X was their politics. Just let them be illegible. Let this be John Hinckley Jr. trying to impress Jodie Foster, locked inside some kind of mania, not some kind of legible political actor.
You were up there getting that information as it came in. I guess I’ve had a question about our whole debate over politics and motive: What does knowing a lone gunman’s motive tell us and not tell us? What meaning does it permit us to make — because I think we’re looking for it as a way of making meaning — and what doesn’t it?
Yes, it’s fascinating. I said in that initial press conference, or one of them, that I’d hoped it wasn’t a Utahn, and that somebody had driven from another state or from another country.
By the way, just as an aside: In real time, watching some people of a different political ideology take that and accuse me of racism — that I wanted it to be an illegal immigrant or something — seeing that happen is just crazy to me. But there is no generosity. And it has happened to me on both sides of the political spectrum.
I believe firmly, and what I’ve tried to do is just to share what the facts are. Because too often we have a tendency to hide those things, and when we do that, we lose trust. And we’ve lost so much trust in our institutions, so much trust in our elected leaders. If there was clear evidence right up front that this guy had a MAGA hat and had been MAGA, I would have said that, too. So I think it’s important that we understand the facts of every single one of these cases, whatever it is.
There are examples — you’ve pointed out examples, and I have pointed out examples — of people all across the political spectrum who have committed these atrocities. I think it’s only helpful in that we do need to try to figure out if there is something we can do societally to prevent these things from happening. And the only way to do that is to find out why they happened and how they happened. And if there is a certain belief system or a way that people went from one fairly normally held belief to something else, trying to understand the human condition in such a way that: Are there things we can do to try to prevent this from happening again?
I think those are worthy discussions. But if we’re only trying to find out the motive of the person or the political ideology of the person so that we can feel better about ourselves or to hate a broad group of people who have no intention or don’t support this type of behavior in any way, then that’s not healthy.
Well, I think we’re trying to find out because we want to know. But then the question is: What do we do with that knowledge?
You said that the evidence suggests the shooter had a leftist ideology. I’ve watched the Trump administration in the days since the shooting, saying that there is a crackdown on what they call the radical left — without defining it — that is now necessary. That we shouldn’t be thinking of this as the act of one man — we should be thinking of it as the outcome of some broader network/culture/ideology that, if this is to be a safe society, needs to be repressed, suppressed, destroyed.
What have you thought about that?
So I’ve obviously heard that. I’ve tried to be careful in a couple of ways. One, my political ideology and my faith teach that every person is responsible for their own actions — so we have agency. It’s the greatest gift that we’ve been given as human beings. And this person made a very, very, very terrible decision. As a society, we need to hold that person accountable, again, to the greatest extent of the law.
And I always cautioned against removing agency from a person, that this person didn’t have a choice, that this person acted because he had been acted upon. I think that’s a big mistake. I think that’s an illiberal ideology, and it’s something that I reject when the left does it and I reject when the right does it.
As to the radicalization piece — and again, I know that wasn’t defined as radical left or whatever that is — I think we do need a deeper dive to understand: What is radicalization? How does radicalization happen? And are there things we can do to prevent that from happening?
That is a worthy discussion. But we have to do that within the bonds of our Constitution and within the bounds of the law.
And look, I don’t get to speak for Charlie. I don’t presume to. I didn’t have a relationship like Vice President Vance or others — I just want to be clear about that. But one of the things I truly appreciated about Charlie was his defense of persuasion. His defense of being willing to show up on campus and engage. His defense of the founders’ vision for our country. His defense of free speech.
Archived clip of Charlie Kirk: I go around universities and have challenging conversations because that’s what’s so important to our country — to find our disagreements respectfully. Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.
His words: If we stop talking to each other, that’s when the violence starts:
Archived clip of Kirk: When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
I don’t think that you can remove this radical ideology through just pure repression or the means of government enforcement. I think it’s going to take more speech and more sunlight and more disagreement. More words, and less violence.
Now, again, if there is a way to do that, I’m certainly open to understanding it. But I truly think that the answer to getting rid of what got us into this situation is not more of the type of thing that these anarchists or evil people have brewing in their souls.
What do you think about the people on the right who say: Look, this was a guy at his best, at least, who is trying to operate through persuasion, who is trying to do politics the way you all say it should be done? And this just shows you can’t. They tried to kill Donald Trump. They tried to kill Charlie Kirk. They’ll come for all of us, eventually.
This has been a more common reaction in some ways than I would have expected. I do think it reflects people who, as I have spoken to them and tried to understand where they’re coming from, get more death threats than I realized. I think many of them have been quite radicalized by that.
But this sense of: He tried to do it through persuasion. He was killed. The period of persuasion, of normal politics, is over — how do you respond to people who want to give up on politics in that way?
Well, I first respond with a great deal of compassion and sympathy. I actually think that’s a very normal reaction, and it’s one I’ve had to question myself on many occasions. He’s literally in the act of doing the thing that he said would help us prevent violence, and he’s been killed for it. So I just think that’s a human response, and I think we should give a lot of grace for that response.
And then I hope that we can elevate what he taught and the reasons behind it and understand what the consequences of rejecting that actually mean. And this is where I think many people — some intentionally, but most unintentionally — don’t think through the consequences of rejecting what he was preaching and what he was standing for.
And my question is: OK, and then what? Where does that take us? And how do we engage in a way that doesn’t lead to more of what just happened?
When I started the Disagree Better initiative, I got attacked on the right and the left. The attack on the right was generally — and I’m over-generalizing here: Oh, you just want us to get along. You want us to hold hands. You want a kumbaya moment. You just want us to capitulate.
And that’s not what I meant at all. I chose the term “disagree” first, because I think disagreement is absolutely critical, that we should be fighting — as you do on your podcast, and as I do in other ways for what I believe in — and doing everything possible to win elections and to convince people to join our side and our tent so that we can adopt policies that make a difference.
I don’t think unity means agreeing together. As Yuval Levin says, I think it means acting together, and acting together is very different. Acting together is acting within the constraints that the Constitution gives us.
The disagreement that came from the left was actually different than that. It was: Why should I talk to those people? Why would I engage with those people? And as Charlie said: I actually do believe that is more dangerous. I do believe it is more dangerous when we’re not talking to each other.
Look, there are two ways this can go, and I’ve warned people before: If you don’t like Charlie Kirk, what comes after Charlie Kirk is going to be far, far worse. Charlie had a vision for young men in this country. A vision of self-worth, a vision of building, a vision of morality — getting out of the party culture and getting out of the darkest parts of the internet and building a life, getting married, having kids — human flourishing, which I think is so important — pushing back against the Andrew Tates and others on the more liberal side of things. I’ve heard it said that by killing Charlie Kirk, you’ve now created a million more Charlie Kirks. The best version of that can be very healthy for us.
I don’t know that I have a great answer, except that the only way we survive as a country — the only way that our ideals that created this grand experiment 250 years ago survive — is if we can find an offramp and continue to engage with one another.
There’s a worse version of Kirk and Kirkism, too. You’re talking about criticism from the left. The criticism I’ve gotten quite a bit of from the left in the past week or so has been: You’re sanitizing this guy. You’re sanitizing this guy who bused people to the Jan. 6 protests, sanitizing this guy who said the Democratic Party hates America, who said the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.
Archived clip of Kirk: If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out, and they’re saying it for us. They’re coming out, and they’re saying: I’m only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Sanitizing this guy who said Spencer Cox should be expelled from the Republican Party after you vetoed a bill.
There was a side of him that did dialogue — although some people feel he weaponized it — but there’s also a side of him that was open to much more illiberal means, and they see that running through. And they say that in pretending that this was a kind of path that we could all be on together — this is related to the critique you got from the left — that there’s not a way to be in community with people who do not want to be in community with you, and that there’s a pretense being made here by people who want to be in some kind of center or have some kumbaya moment that is whitewashing how divided we are.
“Disagree Better” is fine when our disagreements are within a certain range, but I think something I have become more sensitized to, even in the last week, is how many people think our disagreements are already out of that range — that we have already gone through some kind of national divorce. And the question we are really in now is simply: In what way will it be effectuated?
Sure, and I’ve heard those same complaints. I’ve heard them for a long time, far before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And to a guy who, a few years ago, did want me out of the Republican Party — I’ve been told he didn’t share that sentiment now — but I get that, and I applaud it.
And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here — that we can have these types of disagreements and that the people who are talking to you can very much use their platform to say that they don’t think we should whitewash everything that he said, and that they had real concerns with him.
That is part of what we’re trying to do. That’s part of the grand experiment. I don’t think they should give up those views — their opposition to Charlie Kirk or their opposition to me. I think that is well within bounds and what we should be doing.
I do worry that you and I are still too trapped into a very deep political culture. This is where we spend our time. We talk to people who are deeply ingrained in political culture. We spend a lot of time with people who are very much online — I’m online too much — you probably are, too — and we start to think that this is the real world.
All those people you’re hearing from about whitewashing Charlie Kirk — the truth of the matter is: A lot of people had never heard of Charlie Kirk before this happened. I think we forget that. And they’re learning about this in real time.
As to that concept of a national divorce: Look, I know this conversation has been pretty dark and pretty pessimistic. We haven’t heard a lot of hopefulness yet. But there are real things out there that can make a difference.
First of all, the group More in Common has done some tremendous research about how we are divided and the different ways we’re divided. What they found was that 70 percent of Americans hate where we are right now. They’re desperate for something different. And neither party is offering them an opportunity for anything different. There is a market failure, as we traditionally understand market failures, in both major parties. At some point, I hope there will be a market correction.
We also have a history in our country of very dark things and tragic things happening that wake us up in a way that allows us to find our better angels: We’ve talked a little bit about the Civil War, we’ve talked about the ’60s. I think you can go back to the Gilded Age — and, certainly, the Great Depression and how we found ourselves out of that. This is not out of the realm of things that happen in our country.
So yes, there are people who are angry, and they’re trying to figure out what this means. And there will be a battle of words about what he stood for, what he didn’t stand for. And that is all very important. But we do have an opportunity for all of those people to just say: You know what? I’m done with this. I’m tired of it. I want something better. And somebody — hopefully, lots of somebodies — will stand up and say: Hey, I don’t like this, either. Maybe you should vote for me.
I watched you up on that stage that week trying to practice politics in a different way than many people are right now. And I want to ask you about some of the things you said, particularly remarks you gave after the suspect was found.
But I could feel you worrying about whether or not we were still — are still — going to come apart, saying that, of all the forms of violence, political violence is distinct, is different, than any other kind of violence. Why?
Well, if I could, and I’ll encourage your listeners: As I was preparing for this, I listened to your last podcast, in which you interviewed Ben Shapiro — by the way: amazing, incredible, I hope everyone listens to it. I think it’s the perfect example of how to engage with someone you disagree with, and in a way that is respectful of both of you. I appreciated that. Thank you for that.
But before that, you talked about political violence and why it was different. While it was an attack on an individual, it is broader than that — it is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on our ideals. It is an attack on the founding principles of our country.
I’ve had legislators whose kids have asked them to get out of politics because it’s too dangerous. That is the biggest red flag I can see. That’s why political violence is so damning and so dangerous, because it takes us out of the public square and it makes us fearful of engaging.
This was a conversation I had with President Trump. He talked very directly to me about the assassination attempt on his life and how dangerous the job of president is.
And if someone out there just decided not to run for office because they’re fearful for their safety, if someone out there decided not to give a speech because they’re worried that they could be attacked, if they are fearful to express an idea — then we are truly broken.
That’s why we have to treat this differently than everywhere else. That’s why this is different than any other type of shooting or violence that we see in our country.
You said that the path to building a better political culture isn’t pretending our differences don’t matter, but actually embracing our differences with one another.
What do you mean by that? What does it mean to embrace differences with each other when the differences are so profound? When they’re over whether people who are living here should be deported or whether Medicaid should be cut or what you should be teaching children in schools? When their stakes have real consequences for ourselves, for each other — what does it mean to embrace difference?
This is where it gets so hard. There are two things that are important here: We definitely need more kindness in our public interactions. We definitely need more peacemakers and bridge builders. We need more people with compassion and sympathy toward people we disagree with. We need more people breaking bread with one another and sitting down together and having those types of moments, those kumbaya moments.
That is not what I’m talking about. I am not talking about kumbaya moments. I’m just trying to get people to stop shooting each other. That’s it.
And the way we do that — the founders were brilliant in understanding this, and they gave us the road map to doing it. And I just can’t emphasize this enough: Unity is not thinking the same things — it’s acting together. And the way we act together is through the constitutional framework that has been set up, and the way we do that is by engaging in an electoral process. It’s by running for City Council and voting for someone in your local City Council or your school board.
When somebody is running for the president of the United States, we have a clash of ideas that are very different: Should we shut the border or should we have an open border? These are the battles that we should be having.
And then your side either wins, or your side loses. If your side wins, then you go about trying to enact all of those things. And if your side loses, then you don’t. And you get a chance now to go build a coalition, which is really important — again, this is where I just feel like we’ve forgotten the importance of persuasion — so that you can win the next time.
And this is the problem. We believe in just short term: If I could just this once win this election, then all of my wildest dreams will come true, and my enemies will go away forever. Or: If we win this presidential election, then I’ll never have to deal with those damn people ever again. And that’s not what the Constitution envisioned. It envisioned that you will always have to deal with those “damn people,” that this is a lifetime of work. It is not a single event.
If I could, just as an aside, because I think this is really important: One of the big mistakes that we have made over the last 250 years with our country is losing the concept of federalism so much. One of the brilliant things that they did that was unique: There had been checks and balances in government in other places, but having two sovereigns at the same time was really important. And here is why: because they didn’t want our national election — our presidential election — to be that important. They really didn’t.
That’s why they gave the federal government a very distinct set of powers. The rest of that was left to the states. They knew that Texas was going to be very different from New Hampshire — or, I guess we’re going back a little bit, so maybe I should say: Virginia was very different than New York. They understood that those local differences were important.
What we’ve done by giving the federal government so much power and taking that away from the states is we’ve upped the stakes of these presidential elections to such a fever pitch that it feels like life or death — and in fact, those are the very terms that we kind of use in our politics, which is so dangerous.
But California should be very different than Utah. And it shouldn’t be: Gosh, if Kamala Harris wins, then the whole country is going to be like California, and that’s something that I just can’t stomach. We’re going to have to do everything possible — and that leads to some very dark places.
So I do think getting back to truly understanding the Constitution and how we act within that will help us to disperse some of the truly terrible feelings that we’re having for each other and give us a framework for acting together.
I think people often move to this federalism point, and I don’t totally disagree with it. There are many ways in which I think it’s even true.
But I think the way people experience politics, as much, at least, as they experience it through policy, is they experience it through media and culture. And something just very different than the way American politics worked at the founding — or the way it worked in 1927 or in 1977 — is that our media has nationalized, and our local media has weakened terribly, so you know a lot less about what is happening right around you and a lot more about what is happening elsewhere. We have national cable news, we have national social and algorithmic media.
Something that I notice a lot of on the right, not only on the right, is the grabbing of something from wherever in the country — this thing happening in this random school district somewhere — and then all of a sudden, it’s a national cause célèbre, a national story. It’s like you don’t have that separation anymore.
If you lived in New York at the time of the founding, you didn’t know that much about what was happening in rural Virginia. But now you can live in rural Virginia and know a lot about what is happening anywhere in New York. Zohran Mamdani is a national story in a way that is unusual, in part because so much media is concentrated here.
That feels like a big piece of this to me, that we’re all kind of locked in this box where our local politics for a lot of people has dissolved into something they barely even know anything about. How many people can name their state senator? Their assembly member? Their City Council member? And yet so many people can tell you what is happening in a school district they now hate, or what they think about how crime is policed in San Francisco.
These are local issues, but I don’t think we live in a world right now where local issues calm the debate. Instead, people hunt for the local story that will show us the deepest difference from one another. Then they blow that up.
And in part because there is nothing to do about it nationally, it creates this incredible cultural pressure in our politics, and the only way to win is to vanquish the other side, because otherwise they’re just going to be there doing what they’re doing, and eventually it’s going to seep into you and your children.
I couldn’t agree more. When I graduated from Utah State University in 1998, if you took Political Science 101, which I did, the first thing you learned is that all politics is local. So if the president of the United States was coming to visit your state, he would learn some local issues: There’s a water issue, or there is an infrastructure issue —
There are ethanol subsidies in Iowa. [Chuckles.]
There you go. That’s the perfect example. So he would show up, and he would talk about these local issues, and you’d be like: Oh, that guy gets me. I like that guy. He understands our issues. When it’s a couple of staffers who were briefing him on the flight over.
That has completely changed. I now believe that the ethos of politics is that all politics is national. So the exact opposite happens: You show up to a local school board meeting or a local City Council meeting, and they’re talking about something that’s happening in New York or a school district in Virginia. You are absolutely right — that is part of it.
There are two things that I think are the focal point of this, and you hit on the first one that I think is very damaging: It was the rise of cable news, first and foremost, and the need for content. And then the understanding by cable news, working with psychologists and psychiatrists, of the outrage effect and the addiction that happens through dopamine releases for outrage, which is a real thing.
So then you started to get not just cable news that was covering what was happening in the country — but to fill in the gaps when nothing was happening, you would get two people screaming at each other. And that’s very addicting.
Then social media takes that and puts it on steroids — there’s no question. The algorithms drive us if I’m fed outrage — especially if I can see the worst of the other side. So people always say that you get locked in this cocoon — that you only see your side of the story, which is true.
But it’s not just that you’re hearing people telling you what you want to hear about you. It’s that they’re cherry-picking the worst of the other side so that you can get outraged and justify your feelings about that. And that is happening — it’s well documented.
There’s something else that I think is important. We have to go back to the early 2000s when Professor Robert Putnam at Harvard wrote a book called “Bowling Alone.” And this idea of loneliness is, I believe, at the core of all of our greatest problems in this country right now. If you look through history, there is less now of what we would call community.
One of my favorite things to do when I’m in a crowd is to ask: How many of you belong to the Rotary Club? Or the Lions Club, an Elks Lodge — whatever volunteer organization? And maybe 50 years ago, almost every hand would have gone up. Now, almost no hands go up. There may be a little bit of a reawakening happening, but same thing with religious affiliation. Do you go to church on Sunday? Do you have people in your life outside of the virtual world where you can have dinner and have conversations and get to know each other better?
And that loneliness epidemic: Now, if I don’t have any real friends in my town, at least I can hate the same people together on Facebook. That’s where it starts.
I do just want to say for the record, my wife and I are 12 years sober when it comes to cable news. We turned it off 12 years ago. We had a Fox News addiction in our family. And we’ve been happier, healthier, our marriage is better, our relationship with our children is better — all of that. And now, sadly, social media has taken up even more of that.
One of the things I always think when I hear this argument about loneliness is I don’t think we’re online because we’re lonely — I think we’re lonely because we’re online.
Yes, yes.
And the loneliness is partially a product there. Sometimes you’re lonely being online with people you know — the canonical kids texting their friends instead of hanging out in person. But I also think that, even for people who are not lonely online, there is something really disastrous about the politics it produces.
So the perspective we’re getting on other people right now, in this moment of extreme emotion, is so dangerous. Henry Farrell, the political scientist, has a great piece about this where he talks about that one thing that politicians, like you, are always doing is trying to get a sense of the public. I mean, what do you really have? How many people can you talk to in a day? Not that many. I guess there are polls, but that tells you one kind of thing, and it’s a very, very coarse snapshot.
And then people, whether they know it or not, go looking for some other kind of shortcuts, some other kind of way of conceptualizing the public. For a while, the news did it one way: How is the news responding to things? Then cable news. And if you’re on the right, Fox News became the right. If you’re in the Democratic Party, MSNBC became the voice of the Democratic Party.
I’m sure I have many of the same criticisms of cable news that you do. I don’t watch much of it myself, but seeing how cable news has been treating the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death and seeing what it is like when I log on and try to check the temperature on X, on Bluesky, on other platforms — it’s night and day.
It is something about the algorithms, that what they want in this hungry, heedless dumb fashion is just something that makes you emotional. They don’t care how it grabs you — just that it grabs you.
And so we’re all acting from this sense of a malformed public. We have this idea of who the other side is, particularly in our heads, and it’s not who they are.
Something that I think is interesting about your work before this is that a lot of us have just treated this as an inevitability, that I think we think the public square has become degraded. I think we think what social media is doing, not just politically but in many cases, the way young men are getting addicted to porn — we think it’s all bad. But what are you going to do? Free market.
And that’s not really been your approach. I think something that’s interesting in your politics and your policy is a sense that we’ve abdicated our responsibility to choose and shape. I mean, we shape markets, but we don’t really shape online life.
And I get the sense it’s actually a pretty big place where you diverge with a lot of other people, where you think we should and need to, particularly for children. Can I get you to talk a bit about not just what you’ve done but actually the theory of it?
Yes. Look, I’m a tech optimist — I have been. I’m a huge believer. I come from the telecom world. I was giving speeches many years ago, 12 or 13 years ago, on the Arab Spring and how social media was going to bring us all together and allow us to see past cultural divisions and solve all of our greatest problems. And here we are.
We passed some of the most comprehensive social media legislation in the country a couple years ago here in Utah. And we passed several bills that I think are really important to protecting our young people. But it is more than that, and it is bigger than that, and it is philosophical, and it is deeper than that.
I think we’ve made a huge mistake. I think our response to technology and specifically, to social media — and what it has done to our young people — has been abhorrent.
We both know Jonathan Haidt, who’s written the pre-eminent book, “The Anxious Generation.” I was talking to Jonathan well before “Anxious Generation” came out, when I saw some of his initial work. He was in front of Congress sharing some of that, which led to the passage of those bills here in Utah.
But it is deeper than that. It’s a decision we’ve made to allow these companies to hijack our kids in ways we would never allow otherwise. We do not allow historically contractual relationships between corporations and minors for their data.
The algorithm runs on us. It is our agency. There’s a great book called “Our Biggest Fight” by Frank McCourt that I would recommend, where they make a really interesting argument that they’re taking our agency from us and that our identity — really, our personal freedom — is bound up in that, and we have to take that back from them.
The social graphs that they use, which know us better than we know ourselves, that allow us, as you so eloquently stated and better than I could, to understand what makes us emotional and what keeps our eyeballs on there — so that when a kid is somehow, even if they don’t want to be, on TikTok at 3 a.m., just going from video to video, and they’ve given up their free will — that is unbelievably dangerous.
When tobacco companies addicted us, we figured out a way out of that. When opioid companies did that to us — we’re figuring our way out of that. And I’m just here to say that I believe these tech companies, with trillion-dollar market caps combined, are doing the same thing — the same thing that tobacco companies did, the same thing that the opioid companies did. And I think we have a moral responsibility to stand up, to hold them accountable and to take back our free will.
You went on in that speech to say something I quoted in the episode I released a few days ago now, which is that we don’t know what kind of turning point this will be for the country. It could be one toward something better. It could be one toward something worse. It could not be one at all. But we can each choose our own reaction. We at least have agency over ourselves and how we respond to politics next.
What are you hoping people do?
Well, I hope that people had that dark feeling in the pit of their stomach like you and I had, and I hope they will remember that. And I hope that they will ask themselves: Am I part of the problem? Or can I be part of the solution?
I hope that people will build community. I think we make a mistake telling our young people that they need to go out and change the world. I’ve given those speeches at graduations. The truth is, it’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen — most people will not have a huge impact on the world as we understand it. And sadly, I think many of these most evil people that we’re talking about, including shooters, are trying to have some sort of impact on the world.
What I think we should be telling our young people is that they shouldn’t be trying to change the world — they should be trying to change their community and their neighborhood. That’s where I really want people to focus.
The experts, again, have said that service is one of the most important things that we can do for our own mental health, but also for building community. I would encourage them to join a faith, a congregation — believe in something bigger than yourself. And if you’re not interested in faith, then find a group, a positive tribe, that is doing good in this world, that will give you a place to meet people who are different than you. I think all of those things are how we do this differently.
I hope people will log off social media — especially Discord and 4chan and the deepest and darkest places — and find human beings again. You said it best: It’s not that we’re lonely and seeking out social media — it’s that social media is making us more lonely. And I need people to get out of that and get back in the real world. The virtual world is not real life. And we need the real world.
I will just say that A.I. is going to make this a thousand times worse. Hopefully, we have our eyes wide-open as we head into whatever this next thing is.
Absolutely, we don’t. [Chuckles.]
But do you have views on what would de-escalate our politics beyond individual action? We talked a little bit about federalism, but I’m thinking of something that’s more about our politics, about politicians, about your sense that you described a few minutes ago: that there are a lot of people who don’t want politics to feel this way. There is an unmet market for something different, and yet we are getting a lot of this — however you may define “this” — and it feels like it’s been getting worse, not better.
Politics is structural. It’s shaped by primaries, by money, by all kinds of things. You’re a professional practitioner of the arts — what would make for a better politics than what we have?
So there is a lot of research about this, and again, I would point to the Politics and Social Change Lab at Stanford, which has run some pretty interesting experiments with what they call interventions. There are several of them.
Unwittingly, a professor at the University of Utah sent a video that I filmed with my Democratic opponent in 2020, when we were trying to de-escalate coming out of that terrible summer — George Floyd and the pandemic and everything else.
And what they found was that one of the things that can de-escalate — especially, interestingly enough, people’s thoughts toward political violence — was having politicians onstage together or on camera together, talking about how they disagreed without hating each other.
That is powerful. They found that there was a measurable drop in that polarization and thoughts of violence toward the other side when you were able to get political elites, as they call them — and that’s a term of art for them: political elites are people of high political office — in a room together, talking like human beings.
So that’s something we’ve encouraged. We’ve filmed lots of videos together. I’ve encouraged my fellow governors — governors are a great way to do that. But I would also caution that no one person — no governor, no president — is going to be able to get us out of this. It really is those individual decisions that you focused on earlier.
Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I’ve probably already mentioned a couple of them. I’ll go ahead and just mention “Our Biggest Fight” by Frank McCourt, since I already mentioned it. We passed some legislation around that this year in Utah, by the way. What we passed for social media companies is kind of like the 1996 Telecom Act: It would allow you to make your data portable and take it to other companies, which we think will increase competition, but also allow you to have your data deleted from these companies, which is important.
The second one I would urge is Yuval Levin, since I already mentioned him. I’m going to cheat and do two-for-one here. He’s written two books that I think are the most important books. The first one is called “A Time to Build.” It’s really a rehash of almost everything we’ve talked about today. And then “American Covenant” was his latest one, which is kind of an answer to “A Time to Build.” “American Covenant” is about the Constitution and how it can solve this polarization that we’re in right now.
The last one I will mention is by Jeffrey Rosen. It’s about the Declaration of Independence, called “The Pursuit of Happiness.” As we’re celebrating 250 years, that phrase in the Declaration — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”: So “Life,” we all understand what life is. “Liberty” — that’s freedom. But “the pursuit of Happiness,” we misunderstand. “The pursuit of Happiness” was a term that actually dates back to the Stoics, back to Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius. The founders understood the pursuit of happiness was not the pursuit of pleasure — it’s the pursuit of virtue, of personal enrichment and of taking care of the people around us. And getting back to those virtues, I think, is critical for our country.
It’s the responsibility piece — you have freedom on one side and responsibility on the other side. We’ve forgotten the responsibility piece to be better people that will lead us to human flourishing — and I think that’s something our country needs right now.
Governor Spencer Cox, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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