“From ‘Bowling Alone’ to scrolling alone”: Legislators on an “atomized” America
Introduction
By Kate Selker
February 4, 2026
These are divided times in a polarized country; eight of ten adults in the United States say that Republican and Democratic voters can’t even agree on basic facts. But last week in the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, a Republican governor and Democratic congressman came together—and largely agreed with one another.
Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, and Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts, kicked off the spring semester at the Forum with their conversation, “Political Polarization and the Path Forward.” They tackled national division, the “atomization” of our communities and public life, and the impact of social media on both the partisan divide and young people.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and HKS Dean Jeremy Weinstein introduced the conversation, which Professor Nancy Gibbs moderated.
Healey cited the “toxicity of extreme polarization” and the power of social media to deepen divides. Auchincloss and Cox both spoke to the nation’s political and interpersonal division, and how social media fans the flames of that rift.
On national divides
Cox suggested that Americans are divided in part because they’re disconnected from civic life. If people don’t interact with their neighbors, they can’t build relationships across lines of difference or engage in healthy debate.
He referenced Professor Robert Putnam’s influential book “Bowling Alone,” which speaks to the impact of Americans’ decreased participation in civic organizations, such as rotary clubs or sports leagues.
“We’re lonelier than we’ve ever been before, where everybody’s bowling, but there's no bowling leagues. We're not bowling together,” Cox said. “And then you introduce social media and that just puts all of it on steroids.”
“From ‘Bowling Alone’ to scrolling alone,” Auchincloss added.
Cox suggested that social media can give people a false sense of connection and impact—when, in reality, it can have just the opposite effect.
“Maybe this time, if I post on, on Twitter, it will change the world,’ right? ‘Just one more tersely worded post will change everything,” he said.
“We should be telling people to go and change their neighborhoods, to focus there, and to serve and give back. Volunteer at the local food bank. Go ask your neighbor how they're doing,” he said. “Ultimately, that is how we change the world—by strengthening our communities.”
Auchincloss added that in-person engagement is especially important for legislators.
“It’s really incumbent on elected leaders to not do the lazy thing and passively consume the [social media] feed and be like, ‘well, that’s where people are at,’” he explains.
“When I’m trying to get my pulse on the public opinion of my district, I try to get a kaleidoscope of input. I'm doing walking tours of towns where I’m talking to local officials. I’m meeting with small business owners. I’m talking to faith leaders. I’m talking to financial advisors who are themselves advising my constituents. I'm obviously doing town halls.”
On the lure of social media
While both leaders emphasized social media’s power to atomize our society, they acknowledged that it’s hard to resist, and young people may be particularly vulnerable to both its draw and its dangers.
“These social media firms have become experts at rewiring the dopamine mechanisms of young brains and really creating addictive pathways,” Auchincloss explained.
Cox pointed to the impact of disturbing online content in particular. Whereas prior generations of children may have had some buffer to tragedy outside their own communities, now young people can access graphic violence in real time all over the world. He brought up the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, whose graphic murder has been viewed millions of time online.
“We’re showing 5-year-old kids, 8-year-old kids [within] minutes [of] this happening—with a closeup, right?” he explains. “We’re not capable of processing all this terrible stuff. And it’s damaging to our mental health.”
A public health lens on social media and AI
To address these dangers, Cox and Auchincloss draw lessons from the field of public health.
Auchincloss proposed we “treat what is happening with social media analogously to how we treated alcohol, which is to say, ‘it can be fun. It’s a social lubricant. Don’t do it while you’re driving. Don’t do it too much. And kids probably shouldn’t do it, right?’” he said. “It’s not about wagging your finger and being like, ‘you can never use any social media.’ No, it’s about saying, ‘temperance—everything in moderation.’”
And just as a parent can look up consumer safety ratings for their child’s bicycle helmet, he explained, they should be able to tell what an app will do to their child’s developing brain.
Auchincloss has proposed “unanxious generation” bills—a nod to psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s influential book “The Anxious Generation”—which he described as a “touch grass temperance movement around social media.” These bills include proposals to restrict social media platforms for children under 13, tax digital advertising revenue from social media corporations, and tackle legal immunity for digital platforms.
“If an AI bot is giving you medical advice that a doctor would give you, it should be able to be sued like a doctor can be sued,” he argued.
Cox, too, is hoping to hold social media and technology companies to account for the harms they can cause.
“We’re suing all the major [social media] companies,” he said. “And they’re suing us because of many of the laws we passed to protect our kids…if it hits them in their wallet, that’s when we’ll start to see the changes that we desperately need.”
“These companies are acting like the tobacco companies,” Cox suggested. “They knew the harms. They’ve tried to hide that…the only difference is they’re much more powerful.”/
“Making politics boring again”
While social media plays on the public’s attraction to extremes, Cox and Auchincloss suggest that many Americans are ready for something different—especially when it comes to politics.
“I don't necessarily agree that the American public is hungry for stagecraft to upstage statecraft. There is absolutely an opportunity to campaign on making politics boring again.”
Cox agreed: “This ‘politics as entertainment’ burns itself out very quickly and people are tired of it.”
Ultimately, he said, the way to lower the temperature on national discord and connect across the aisle is to “come together in real life,” and that Americans can vote a more connected nation into being.
“It really is a collective decision that we’re tired of this, we want something different, that we start to support candidates who offer something different,” Cox said. “We respond positively when the candidates do work across the aisle.”
He had strong words for those who resisted their representatives’ desire to connect across party lines.
“We should try to reward that type of behavior instead of punish that type of behavior,” Cox said. “If you’re the kind of person who thinks that your member of Congress has to agree with you on every single thing—and if you see them even starting to flirt with the center or, or someone on the other side, that that’s completely unacceptable, just know that you're part of the problem.”
Photography by Martha Stewart