Incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox, left, talks with Utah Rep. Phil Lyman after Utah's gubernatorial GOP primary debate.Mother Jones; Issac Hale/The Deseret News/AP

On a stormy night in February, Phil Lyman made a campaign stop at the Taylorsville-Bennion Heritage Center, where a warm room full of conservatives had braved the weather to hear from several Utah political candidates. A Republican state representative, Lyman was pardoned by former President Donald Trump for a trespassing charge he picked up for driving an ATV in an illegal protest on public lands in 2014. Now he was running for governor.

When he got up to speak, Lyman asked the 50 or so attendees, “How do you like ‘Disagree Better’? How’s that feel to ya?” A chorus of boos and jeers erupted from the MAGA partisans in the crowd, who immediately recognized the reference to the pet cause of Lyman’s opponent, incumbent Spencer Cox. As chairman of the National Governor’s Association, Cox has spent the past year trying to convince Americans to “disagree better” and dial back the very sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in.

Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”

The vitriol about Disagree Better is remarkable given how innocuous—even anodyne—Cox’s initiative seems. But Amanda Ripley, the author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, isn’t surprised. She’s spent some time with Cox, and the NGA’s official Disagree Better website offers her book as a resource on depolarization.

“We’ve set up a system that rewards conflict entrepreneurs.”

What Cox is doing is “countercultural, going against a whole system of incentives and motions that are driving this thing. And that’s lonely and difficult to do, which is why you don’t see a lot of people doing it.” She suspects that Cox’s nod to civility poses a threat to people who benefit from political strife. “We’ve set up a system that rewards conflict entrepreneurs,” she told me. The sharp backlash against Cox’s campaign among the MAGA faithful “could be evidence that it is working,” she said. “In other words, if it bugs them, maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

Disagree Better got its start in Cox’s first race for governor in 2020 when he grew increasingly concerned about the overheated political discourse and its potential to lead to violence—a fear that came to pass on January 6. A few months before the November election, Cox had reached out to Chris Peterson, his Democratic opponent, and convinced him to make a joint ad arguing for civility in political discourse. The ad, hailed by Inc. magazine as a “masterclass in leadership,” went viral. In a follow-up ad, both candidates also committed to accepting the results of the presidential election.

Researchers at Stanford University’s Strengthening Democracy Challenge later found that the ad was one of the most effective interventions they’d tested in terms of reducing support for political violence and anti-democratic policies.
For Cox, the ad was not particularly risky. The last time a Democrat won a governor’s race in Utah was in 1980, and Cox went on to crush Peterson by more than 30 points. But apparently, the........

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