They don’t choose to look the other way. They were never pointed towards the relevant stuff in the first place. It’s easy to assume that you’re making a rational anti-Trump decisions based on all the available information. You aren’t. The digital age is full of people who make the assumption that everyone else is seeing the same landscape as them and making different judgments. It’s bewildering. How can they etc? Confirmation bias would normally account for political difference, and confirmation bias can be overcome by reasonable discussion. Since 2008 confirmation bias has been digitised and the algorithms that underpin your online experience don’t give you the same picture as the average conservative. You’re yelling at each other about different landscapes and wondering why nobody is listening.

Imagine someone on a Pacific island and someone in Alaska. They’re both dipping their toes in the same water – but they’d be hard pushed to describe their concepts of ‘ocean’ to each other. If your entire experience of oceans is coral reefs, you may not be able to conceptualise icebergs and vice versa. Is either of them wrong? Not at all. They’re both just limited. In this case by geography, in the online world by a failure to recognise the existence of machine learning and taking steps to counter act it by actively seeking the opposite political experience.

Polarisation is a product of lazy people from both the right and left not doing the required reading for their intelligence level.