Below, Spencer Cox shares five key insights from his new book, Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt.
Spencer is the governor of Utah and the chair of the National Governors Association. A lifelong public servant who grew up on a small farm in rural Utah, he has spent years leading national conversations on political polarization and healthy disagreement.
What’s the Big Idea?
Political disagreement doesn’t have to tear us apart. Contempt does. If we can replace contempt with curiosity and stop treating people who disagree with us as enemies, we can rebuild relationships without giving up our beliefs.
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1. The day the theory became personal.
For years I’d been warning about the dangers of political polarization: writing articles, giving speeches, chairing a national initiative on healthy disagreement. It was research. It was policy. Then on September 10, 2025, my assistant pulled me out of a staff lunch and told me there’d been a shooting at Utah Valley University. Charlie Kirk had been shot.
I spent the next hour relaying updates to the Situation Room, watching the medical language shift from hopeful to dire. A few minutes after Charlie’s last moments, I was on the phone with the president, trying to explain what little we knew.
That day, the highest-profile political assassination in 50 years happened in my state, in a place people call Happy Valley. All my research on polarization suddenly stopped being theoretical.
The real danger in America isn’t disagreement. It’s contempt. Disagreement says you’re wrong. Contempt says you’re beneath me. One is healthy. The other is corrosive. Contempt is what’s tearing us apart.
2. Architects, not arsonists.
Back in 2020, I was running for governor of Utah against a Democrat named Chris Peterson. We disagreed on almost everything: taxes, energy, health care. But at a fundraiser, a friend asked me a question I couldn’t shake: Isn’t there something you can do about the divide in our nation?
So I called my opponent and pitched him something strange. What if the two of us stood together on the same stage and told voters that no matter who won, we were Utahns first? I told him he’d have complete veto power over every word. To my surprise, he said yes.
“What if the two of us stood together on the same stage and told voters that no matter who won, we were Utahns first?”
A week later we filmed a 60-second ad called We Approve. Two candidates from opposing parties, standing side by side, saying we could disagree without hating each other. We posted it with low expectations, but then it went viral. Millions of views in one day. Stanford researchers later tested 252 different interventions designed to reduce political violence and undemocratic attitudes among 32,000 people. Our ad was one of the most effective they found.
Something as simple as seeing two rivals stand together humanizes both of them. Americans are hungry for architects. Not arsonists.
3. Why we think we’re the good guys.
There’s a phenomenon social scientists call motive attribution asymmetry: we assume our own side acts out of love, while we assume the other side acts out of hate. Harvard’s Arthur Brooks has found that the average Republican and the average Democrat today show a level of this asymmetry comparable to Israelis and Palestinians. Each side is certain that they are driven by benevolence, and certain that the other side is driven by malice.
This is a trap, and almost nobody is exempt from it. Once you believe your opponents are motivated by evil rather than simply a different set of values from your own, you stop listening to them entirely. There’s nothing to learn, nothing to consider—just an enemy to defeat.
Understanding this mechanism doesn’t automatically cure it. But naming it is the first step toward catching yourself in the act—noticing the moment you assume the worst about someone’s motives instead of just their conclusions.
4. Lead with curiosity, not contempt.
A friend of mine, LGBTQ advocate Troy Williams, spent years as what I’d call a professional arsonist. He would find the worst thing his opponents said, blasting it out to stir outrage and raise money. It worked. It also accomplished almost nothing.
“Once you believe your opponents are motivated by evil rather than simply a different set of values from your own, you stop listening to them entirely.”
Eventually he changed his approach entirely. He built relationships instead of press releases, interpreted his opponents’ words in the most generous light he could, praised people in public, and only ever criticized them in private. In 2022, he did something that stunned everyone who knew him: he bought a booth at the Utah Republican State Convention, in the middle of 4,000 of the most conservative delegates in the state.
It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Troy became one of the key architects of a landmark compromise protecting both LGBTQ Utahns and religious freedom, because he’d built enough trust to be in the room. Curiosity opens doors that contempt slams shut.
5. Choose the relationship over being right.
My father-in-law was a great man. He was kind, funny, and endlessly patient despite decades of chronic pain from a badly broken back. But after he retired, he started listening to angry political talk radio every afternoon while he recovered from a hard day of ranch work. Slowly, something in him shifted. He grew combative, quick to pick a fight over politics. Our family visits became fewer and further between. We felt like we were losing the person we knew, even though he was still right there in front of us.
That story isn’t unique to my family. In 2012, only about 7 percent of Americans said they’d lost a close friend over politics. By 2024, that number had climbed past one in four. Nearly one in six Americans has cut ties with a family member—and among young progressives, it’s more than one in three.
“If you want a relationship back, the fastest off-ramp usually isn’t a better rebuttal.”
Rebuilding relationships like these rarely happens through a better argument. One story that stuck with me involved a Manhattan professor and a Michigan corrections officer—about as far apart politically as two Americans can get—who agreed to spend a few days living in each other’s homes under three simple rules: take seriously what the other person holds dear; don’t try to convince them they’re wrong; and stay curious. They didn’t change each other’s politics, but they became friends.
We had a similar experience with my father-in-law. If you want a relationship back, the fastest off-ramp usually isn’t a better rebuttal. It’s a phone call, a shared meal, or just showing up. Choose the relationship over being right.
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