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Perfect. Looking up.

Great.

It's coming up towards crunch time in America,

as the country heads towards a presidential election

and the decision about whether to re-elect one of its most

controversial leaders ever, Donald Trump.

We will never kneel, we will stand proud and we will stand tall.

Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter!

I went there last summer because I wanted to try

and understand some of the divisions that were opening up there -

divisions around race, class, identity and economic opportunity.

I made three American journeys,

each to a very different part of the States,

and each exploring one of the big cultural fault lines in the nation.

I'll be making some art about what I saw there,

and because I'm a biker as well as an artist,

I travelled on a motorbike I designed for the trip.

The battle lines in America have since become even more bitter,

with the chaos of the pandemic and protests against racial justice

and police violence erupting onto the streets.

But what my travels there showed me

is a country whose divisions have some unnerving lessons for us all.

Great, that's beautiful.

It was high summer in America when I made this journey.

I set out in search of a very particular tribe,

a group I knew it wouldn't be hard for me to spot,

as I'd be the first to admit that I'm one of them myself.

In this episode,

we're going to talk to some people who are doing pretty well.

They tend to be on the coast of America.

You might describe them as the liberal elite

if you were feeling less charitable.

I've come here to confront one of America's less talked about

but most uncomfortable divides -

the growing gap between the well educated and successful

and the rest.

To start this journey, I'm going to Martha's Vineyard,

an island off the coast of Massachusetts,

and I think this island and its people

are separated by a lot more than a stretch of ocean.

Martha's Vineyard is a summer playground

for America's wealthy liberals.

The Clintons vacation here

and the Obamas own an $11 million beachfront home.

It's also the setting for the 1975 film Jaws,

Steven Spielberg's classic portrait of a holiday community

in deep denial about the danger lurking just offshore.

The forgotten men and women of our country

will be forgotten no longer.

You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement

the likes of which the world has never seen before.

All across America and beyond, anger at so-called elites is on the rise

and populist politicians like Donald Trump have been able to exploit it.

Whether Trump wins or loses in November,

the questions about what led to him are not going to go away.

No Art of the Deal, I see.

To start to understand the people who come here,

I went sailing with custom boat builder Matt.

That's the first boat we built. We built it for James Taylor.

What originally, you know, drew you here?

Well, Pam and I sailed here in 1972.

We were hippies.

Martha's Vineyard in those days was a place where writers

and artists and professors and musicians would come

and have very inexpensive camps, a lot of them with no plumbing.

Do you want to steer? Yeah. What am I steering towards?

Uh... America!

Well, yeah, we are a little bit out from America here, aren't we? Yeah.

But now, you know, Martha's Vineyard, it's a place

where the rich and the powerful hang out now. They do.

But they haven't kicked us out yet.

How much is one of these nice houses along the front here?

They are all over a million,

and then the big ones, they can be up to 10 million,

and they're even higher on the other side, the west side.

The breeze picked up for us, we're scooting along.

Yeah, absolutely. You've got a nice touch at the helm, by the way.

I think people are coming here to escape that other America,

over the other side of the water,

Trump's America - the brash one of strip malls

and plastic fast food joints and its sort of flashy wealth.

Over here, you leave your yellow Porsche in the car park

on the other side of the ferry

and you drive about in a battered old truck,

pretending that you're down-home here in this

kind of handcrafted loveliness that is Martha's Vineyard.

For a place that screams its sort of bohemian, creative credentials,

I've never been to a place where all the men dress the same!

They're all wearing faded coral Ralph Lauren shorts.

It all feels a little bit twinkly-twee,

like the spiritual home of a knitting blogger.

I got invited to a dinner for 17 at the home of

legendary local hostess and socialite Rose Styron,

widow of the famous novelist William.

It's a very, very good people place. Yeah.

My fellow guests are all impressively credentialed figures

from the worlds of business, the media, academia and the law.

Fantastic, because there's so many terrific people here.

They talk about... They talk about elite, the elite.

Do you ever see the elite? They're not elite.

You're the elite. You are the elite.

There's been a lot of talk about the 1%,

the mega-rich whose share of national wealth has ballooned.

But the 20% just below the 1% -

the professional, well-educated, upper middle-class -

are also floating away from the rest economically.

This group might loathe Trump and everything he stands for,

but when I asked them whether their success could have played

any part in his rise, things took an awkward turn.

I wanted to ask you openly, anybody,

why are you in Martha's Vineyard?

Don't you think, though,

the most important thing is that it's an island?

Yes, I think you're bang on. So, we all see ourselves as special,

and so this is an elite island,

where people have separated themselves

from the continental United States by 45 minutes of water,

and it's a new life and none of those people are here.

Well, like you said, we're on an island here, you know.

It's like, "Oh, we're lovely! it's all lovely, isn't it?

"Look at those lovely tasteful houses and everybody's neat

"and everybody's smiling as they ride their bicycles along..."

Where are you getting that from? Well, today...

Who's telling you that?

Well, I've been... Where's that coming from?

How long have you been here to have that impression?

Because that's ridiculous, I'm sorry.

I love you, man, and we're going to be friends forever,

but you have not been here long enough

to make the statement you just made.

I just did a panel, which I do every year, at the Old Whaling Church,

and we had people from the left, from the right,

from the middle and from the crazy.

To say that this is a one-dimensional place

where everybody thinks the same is bullshit.

OK. So I'm here in Martha's Vineyard because it is a flag that says,

"We are so liberal, we are power, we are money, we are East Coast,

"we are kind of lovely, sort of faded, olden days-y loveliness."

And it feels to me, as an outsider,

as a kind of theme park of sort of liberal tastefulness.

Well, for one thing, Martha's Vineyard is not a place

in which we wave a flag of money and power.

People think a lot alike, but we do have a lot of discussion.

What do you think it is, then, that you need to do?

Because obviously, that message is not getting through.

Once we do get rid of...

..vote Trump out and a new leader will emerge,

perhaps that person will be able to explain

what we have in it together. Well, I think it's...

The question that begs me is, you know,

with the present situation here in America, how much are you to blame?

Mm. You know, what is it that you've done, or not done...?

The 15 of us?

Or... Yeah...

What is this programme about?

I wanted to have an intelligent conversation

about why Trump happened.

Well, I didn't talk about that,

and so many of us... But you might have illustrated it.

I'm here in Martha's Vineyard

because I'm interested in what Martha's Vineyard represents.

In terms of what? In American culture.

In terms of what?

I mean, in terms of what?

Martha's Vineyard is not a place in which the people around

this table feel particularly class... classified.

And in fact, on this island,

I think that that characteristic is particularly

either diminished or absent.

So, if that's what you think we are, you're wrong.

What is it about these people, who are incredibly self-aware,

incredibly perceptive about society?

Why has the kind of liberal,

well-educated, er, coastal elites of America

been outmanoeuvred by Trump and his campaign?

You know, why did that happen?

What were they not seeing? What was their blind spot?

And I think that, in many ways, they don't like...

They were uncomfortable with the idea that they were

a caricature of themselves.

You know, they didn't want to be put in a box.

They like to think they're incredibly individual.

And, of course, we are all...

We all, all of us, have a collective identity,

and the uncomfortable thing that we often have to confront

is that we are unaware of that, because it's working for us.

We are part of a super-smooth, well-educated liberal elite

that is being glided to the top of the pile,

and it's not being challenged because it works in this society.

And then for me, perhaps, to point out that you might be a group

and you're doing very well on it, thank you,

and maybe you might want to start kind of questioning your privilege,

that's uncomfortable, particularly with people who think they are

on the side of justice, they are on the right side of history.

It's very uncomfortable for them.

I'm travelling to the spiritual capital of liberal America,

New York City.

I've been trying to understand the consequences of the growing distance

between the nation's metropolitan upper middle classes and the rest.

This morning, the death toll in New York State is nearing 1,000.

Hospitals are reeling, with New York City's mayor warning

they will run out of supplies by this weekend.

I had no idea of the tragedy that would unfold here

and the impact it would have on the presidential election to come.

But what I did find was a bubble - a city whose stark divisions

between the relatively wealthy and successful and the poor

have been thrown into sharper focus by the disaster

that's happened since.

Here I am in lovely, liberal Brooklyn.

This is my kind of place. It reminds me of where I live.

They remind me of my friends.

And I think that one thing that's happened

since Donald Trump is that suddenly, "the liberal elite",

of which I am, you know, I'm quite happily to admit

I am a member of, suddenly, "Oh, God, we're LABELLED now!

"Ooh, you mean that's us?"

Part of the anxiety now is that suddenly, us,

the good burghers of the liberal elite,

have been made to feel a bit self-conscious, and maybe

we're privileged, and what can we do to somehow make it less anxious?

It's tricky.

Cos it's nice, it's comfy.

During my time here, I'll be staying in Park Slope,

a tone-y, brownstone-y neighbourhood in Brooklyn

with some of the best elementary schools in the city.

And you can tell how distinct the tribe who live here are

by something really basic - the way they shop for groceries.

At the Park Slope Food Co-op,

you can't just walk in the door and buy the locally sourced produce,

you have to sign up to work an unpaid two-and-three-quarter-hour

shift every four weeks in order to become a member.

Joe co-founded the co-op in 1973.

So this is the way a member comes in.

I'm active, that means I can go shopping...

That wasn't you on that photo there. That's a much younger guy!

I don't know, it looks a lot like me.

Well, I am a little older. I can't help it.

It just keeps happening.

Everybody who's shopping here, all these people own the place.

Everybody you see here is a member-owner.

So this group of people works together every 28 days,

again and again. The same people?

The same people, so they get to know each other, hopefully,

and like each other and learn how to work as a group together.

We have hundreds of these groups throughout the 28 days...

So, how many members? 17,000. Wow! 17,000! Yeah, yeah. I'm impressed.

"It's too many," she says.

New York is one of the most unequal cities in America,

and more than a million New Yorkers experience food insecurity.

But here was an oasis where Brooklynites play

once a month at performative equality.

I dropped in on the cheese cutters.

I saw Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston. It's a Pinter play.

The Times gave it a very good review.

So what's your day job? I'm an English professor.

Well, now I'm retired, and I'm an ex fabric designer.

I'm a linguistics professor. Jordan's an architect.

We come with our architectural questions every month, right?

I do some of my best socialising at the co-op.

I run into people I know every time I'm here.

All of my friends are members.

Is it like a kind of, er, Masonic cult?

I'm sure it's been called worse.

Um... No, it's more of a social club, in addition to a supermarket.

Is it a kind of hub of shared values?

Well, yeah. I think so, I think so.

I think people...

I mean, this neighbourhood in general, you know,

the city in general has broadly shared values.

Right in the heart of this global metropolis, Park Slopers have built

themselves a little village, and a culturally exclusive one at that.

What I'm finding on this particular

journey around the East Coast here is that the sorts of villages

that people are finding, maybe like in Martha's Vineyard,

and maybe here, and maybe in Brooklyn,

is that we're finding villages,

they're not like the villages out in, you know,

where people are random.

These are villages where perhaps everybody has a good education,

everybody has a sort of similar political persuasion,

everybody has sort of signed up for a certain sensibility.

Social mobility has been stalling in America.

But is it just the sky-high property prices that are barriers

to entry to places like this,

or is it the unwritten cultural codes that apply here?

In Prospect Park,

I met some members of local community group Park Slope Parents.

Here you are in Brooklyn - lovely Brooklyn -

and, you know, this, and this, and the Park Slope Food Co-op

and whatever, you know, they are kind of villages, aren't they? Yes.

It's funny, because people always say to us,

"Why do you still live here?

"You could get all these things back home."

What's your reply?

Well, I wouldn't get these people back home. Yeah?

And I wouldn't get a chosen lifestyle.

But I think, like, back home, it feels like you kind of have

to sit into whatever exists, and I don't feel the same way living here.

I'm looking for people who excite me.

That's not necessarily, for me, people like me.

That diversity of thought is a thing that I don't get

when I go home, right?

It's the thing, like you said, that you go back to

and you're reminded of who you were and who you are today.

Do you really get diversity of thought here, though?

That's the question that's on the tip of my tongue.

Like, we all live here because of our desire for diversity

and for different points of view,

but the truth of the matter is,

we continue to self-select into these, you know,

conversations and ideas and values that are never challenged,

and when we're talking about this, where we want just enough diversity

around us to get those incredible soup dumplings or,

you know, that incredible takeout from the Indian joint

or, you know, whatever it is...

A kind of rom-com diversity, I suppose.

Yeah, in a very sort of quaint, contained way.

But when you have people who are really struggling and, you know,

there is a project being built near your neighbourhood or something

like that, and even a homeless shelter coming into Park Slope,

like, all of a sudden, the idea of others coming too close,

you'll start to see, is a little too uncomfortable.

In the 1950s and '60s, if you were middle-class in America,

you tended to watch the same television shows,

drive the same cars, drink the same brands of beer.

And with that came a degree of shared understanding

of what it was like to live in America.

But as the most successful 20% of Americans self-segregate

into culturally distinct and opportunity-rich neighbourhoods

like Brooklyn, it has grown easier to stoke resentment against them.

I'm talking about the cultured, cosmopolitan,

goat's milk latte drinking, avocado toast eating insiders' elite.

I believe that everybody counts.

And so does the President of the United States of America.

Just across the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, I met Eve,

a colour consultant to the anxious homeowners of New York.

I help people pick paint colours for their houses,

because people are getting more, I guess, concerned

about how to find the right colour.

That word screams at me - concerned. Yeah, the panic,

the colour panic sets in!

I think it's just like an uptick in anxiety, and then, you know,

when there are 100 whites...

100 whites!

You know, that, like, keeps people twirling in circles,

wondering, like, if they're picking the right one.

My metaphor klaxon is going off when you said 100 whites!

I like that!

How do you think that people's sort of choices have become

so agonised nowadays?

What other sort of things are pressing down on them,

apart from their own personal taste?

I see a lot of my clients are really influenced by trends,

I mean, right now we are coming out of what I consider the Grey Age.

Everything has been grey, like, grey, grey, grey.

Grey walls, grey furniture, grey everything.

In London, you can tell the force of gentrification, the tide...

By the grey? The grey window frames. Absolutely.

Absolutely, you can tell - "Oh, they're coming."

One of Eve's clients, Bill, had been stressing about his sisal.

So this sisal is going everywhere, every single surface, wall-to-wall.

And it also goes into the bedroom, right?

The bedroom, the entrance, the kitchen...

Not the bathroom, but absolutely everywhere.

It's just going to be all black.

Wow, so it's going in the kitchen too, all right.

All black, wall-to-wall. What are you seeing here in terms of...

Like, is this still the bright... This is the pink. Yeah, violet pink.

Going back to the grey window frames,

we knew with the grey window frames that a certain sort of person

was moving in, and they were markers,

they were boundary markers as clear and defined as Donald Trump's wall.

And what kind of taste decisions do you think your clientele

are making to kind of insulate themselves from the rest of America?

Yeah, I think in terms of separating out,

a lot of it is about saying, you know,

here is the evidence that I have more taste than you,

more money than you, I don't vote like you, you know.

And do you think the social forces that are happening

at the moment are making perhaps the top 20% of the income group say,

"Yeah, I'm doing OK,"

when suddenly, Trump is calling you out and he's calling you the elite?

I can't stand that word. I find that such an annoying and offensive word.

Are you triggered by the word elite? Yeah, I am!

But it's such a...

Wait a minute, you're not an elite?

Get out! I didn't know I was an elite.

Can you just remind everybody how much we're spending here?

Oh, yeah, you're elite.

I just don't like the word, it's such an ugly word.

But also, what bothers me about it so much also is that it's

attributed to people who have an education, and isn't that what

America is supposed to be - one of our basic, you know...

Yeah, it's confusing that way. ..flag-waving ideas is education?

But it's always used as... It's used as a hammer against educated people.

To call them elites.

Who would have thought that what shade of white

you are painting your lounge could possibly be a signal that you

were travelling in a different direction from the rest of society?

I mean, and it's the fact that they are so considered, and they care,

and it's exquisite, and educated,

that people are signalling to themselves

and to their friends

and to the wider community that they are a different tribe,

and I think there's a kind of retreat, and it's interesting

they're kind of nesting in their Farrow & Ball loveliness.

They are putting up a sort of beautifully weathered stockade

against the rest of Trump's America.

Hunkering down with like-minded liberals might just seem

harmless enough, but increasingly,

what it all boils down to is access to education.

Now more than ever,

you need a graduate education to succeed in America.

A gulf is opening up between those who have got one

and those who haven't.

A division which President Trump has been able to exploit.

We won with poorly educated -

I love the poorly educated.

We're the smartest people, we're the most loyal people...

I've travelled up through New England to Amherst,

a pleasant, white picket fence college town in Massachusetts.

I'm trying to understand the gap between America's super educated

top 20% and the rest -

the San Andreas fault of the American culture wars.

70% of the students in America's 200 most selective colleges

now come from the top 25% of the income distribution.

The culture is shaped in the universities,

and if they're being brainwashed and they've been,

essentially since the progressive era of the 1920s in this country.

And it seems like it's getting worse and worse.

UMass Amherst ranks in the top 25 public universities in the country.

What a welcome!

Hello, I'm Grayson. Nice to meet you. I'm Breanna.

Hello, Breanna.

This is the sorority house. Yes.

What is a sorority house?

It's a sisterhood. It's a bunch of girls who come together

who have similar values, and it's a great support system.

Fraternity is the male version of a sorority.

OK, well, show me around, then.

Wow. This is a first for me.

It's rush week here at UMass,

the time of the year when the college's sororities

and fraternities, throw a series of open-house day events

in order to select their new members.

Because we've so many girls come through our house,

we go through and say, "OK, do we like this girl?

"Do we not like this girl?" And like why.

And then, based on the girls we like,

I put them into our system first.

The girls that we don't like so much go like in the middle

of our system, and the girls who we don't like at all

go at the bottom, and usually the girls at the bottom don't come back.

So, the girls at the bottom could still rank us,

but they still may not come back here.

Oh, I see, cos... And that's when girls cry.

What are these things on the wall here?

So, these are all of our class paddles.

So, after we get a new member class,

each of them make a paddle with all their names on it,

just as a memory, and we keep all of them.

Wow. I like these objects. They're really interesting.

I like the fact they're different,

and they'll tell a sort of history of kind of popular culture.

Exactly, and they all represent that class that's going through.

I think they're great, yeah.

Do you want to see a room? Yeah, let's see a room.

It's OK, it's me.

It's nice, isn't it?

It's an interesting... It's like a family.

Yeah.

It's nice, because they take you under your wing

when you're a new sister,

and like, they look out for you and they mentor you.

What's the afterlife of a sorority?

In Britain, we have this idea that these are kind of networking...

Yeah, we know our alumni, so they come back and they help us

network and stuff, so like, they'll come back and hire sisters for jobs,

and like, they get really involved and really care about the house.

And, like, they want to see us be successful also.

Potentially, it's a pretty important decision

that's happening in this week, you know, for the... Yeah.

..for the lives of the people involved.

Yeah, because we're not here just to, like, mess around.

You know, like, we're here for a reason.

This is a ritualization of the kind of pathway

to the American dream, you know?

These people, at a very early stage in their lives,

are looking for inroads,

they're looking for ways that they can make connections,

that they can establish networks that'll get them jobs,

friends, persuasion, opportunities.

It was time for the traditional Bid Day party,

when the sororities welcome their new members.

Iota Gamma Epsilon have chosen a hippie theme.

These nice young people aren't the Kennedys,

but they are the next generation

of the American educated elite in embryo.

Just by getting accepted into one of the nation's prestigious

institutions, they're on their way to membership of the top 20%,

and to all the bounty of the American dream that holds.

It just so happens that a process that starts as innocently as

a pizza party with a hippie theme

ends up as a kind of corralling of the capitalist resources

of a major world economy.

College-educated Americans might actually have been hippies once,

but since then, they've figured out a way to make

success in a meritocracy something your kids can inherit from you.

I want to understand how these advantages appear to people

who are starting out with none of them.

So, I'm travelling to another village - Flushing,

in the New York borough of Queens.

The American dream - what's the classic story?

People come to this country,

they work damn hard to achieve their goals.

So, I've come here to Flushing, Queens, New York,

to meet some people in the Chinese American community.

And they've got a very clear-eyed view of what they need to achieve

to get their seat at the top table.

For most poorer families in New York,

which high school your kids get to go to is a postcode lottery.

But there is one striking exception to the rule.

Eight of the best-performing schools admit their students

on the basis of a single exam - the SHSAT,

open to every child in the city.

It's a rare route to the top which Asian American communities

in particular are willing to bet the farm on.

12-year-old Eugene's family came to the US from China

when he was a baby.

We had breakfast together.

And what am I eating? Its rice and...?

It's congee with preserved duck egg and pork.

Oh, wow. OK, this is a first for me.

Eugene's set his heart on the hardest to get into

of the eight schools covered by the test - Stuyvesant.

Where would you like to go after Stuyvesant?

After Stuyvesant, I would like to go to Princeton.

Right.

To pursue a degree in medicine.

So, the chances of getting into Stuyvesant are what?

What do you think are the odds?

I'd say 1%.

1%?

So, that's pretty stiff odds.

Yeah. I'm basically like nonstop working.

I've given up most of my free time.

So, all this work you're doing for this test, you know,

so you can get into this really, really good school,

is that sort of fair that you're doing that,

or would it be fairer if you just went to the local school

where everybody else went?

It's not fair that if you're just going to go to the local school,

because in New York, there's something called the Zone Program,

where, depending on where you live, you go to school.

Some people, they have to live in certain neighbourhoods

so that they can afford it.

So, the SHSAT really gives like a chance for people

who aren't as privileged to like be able to have a very good education

and a very good life.

Hmm.

Such is the focus in Asian American communities on the SHSAT,

a booming industry has arisen, coaching students to pass the exam.

Eugene took me to his test prep centre,

one of more than 400 in the city.

If we're pouring 75 gallons,

this is your conversion factor, OK?

Once you have that conversion factor, where do we go next?

Stuyvesant admits around 850 students a year,

and in 2019, 153 of them did test prep at one of the A+ academies.

I spoke to the director, Lulu.

What do you think their kind of end goal is?

The parents want their kids to have a better life.

They don't have the connections.

They don't have, you know, uncle Jim who works at so-and-so firm

that can get you the internship.

They don't have the money for private schools

or special treatment or whatever.

So, what they have is, they have the ability to work hard

and navigate through a meritocratic educational system

and get the education that can empower them to the next level,

to a good college, to a good job,

so that they can achieve what we call this American dream.

How does this kind of very clear, understandable system

compare to other ways that people might get on in America?

Well, I think that the word is fair, right?

It's one standard, one bar that is for everyone.

Race-agnostic, you know, gender-agnostic, income agnostic.

They don't even check your name.

It's, you know, it's just your score.

Yeah, cos it highlights something about the kind of advantages

that a lot of Americans have that they don't realise they have.

Right. It's kind of, it's hidden, it's not, you know,

it's not easily seen, unless you don't have it.

Is Eugene going to get into Stuyvesant?

If I had to bet my money on it, I would think he can do it.

So, Eugene, do you think that the American dream is open to everyone?

Yeah.

Well, it depends what your American dream is.

If your American dream is like obtainable and you're willing

to work hard for it, then I believe it is open for everyone.

A lot of people that live in these very expensive apartments

we can see all round us, you know,

do you think it's fair that they get a lot of the opportunities

that you are working really hard for,

without really working quite as hard as you?

I believe that you have to work hard to obtain something,

or else the thing that you have obtained isn't like truly yours.

You didn't put in the effort to get it.

Wow. Can I fist bump you to that?

That's brilliant.

That is such a good answer.

Increasingly, on this journey,

I'm becoming aware that there's some anomaly in the kind of

political landscape of America that I'm sensing.

Erm, I mean, traditionally, the parties of the left -

the Democrats - they were set up for people at the bottom of the pile,

to give them equal opportunities.

They're the party of the people.

And yet, in the last election,

if you look at the counties who voted for Hillary Clinton,

the Democrat candidate, they account for 64% of the GDP of this country.

64% of the wealth of the United States

was located in the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.

And who lives in those counties?

The well-educated.

And people like Eugene, through his hard work

and his clear-sightedness of where the opportunities lay,

he's hoping one day to be on the inside.

The problem might be, of course, that there is a stockade at all.

I've travelled up the coast to the last village

I'm visiting on this journey, the town of Westport, Connecticut.

It's now largely a commuter town,

and the ninth-wealthiest community in America.

In the 2016 presidential election,

Westport voted by 68% to 27% for Hillary Clinton.

It can be hard for us all to see ourselves as others see us,

but this journey has helped me see the coastal elites

as a Trump supporter may.

Trump has cleverly driven a wedge between places like this

and other parts of America.

It's a manoeuvre which played a key part in his success last time,

and is shaping up to be his strategy again.

At what might well be the poshest protest I've ever attended, I met

art teacher, homemaker and local Democratic party activist Darcy.

We're all standing in Medina in Morocco and it was

so beautiful, the love that I felt in that moment.

And I went back to our hotel,

and I opened my Facebook to find that

a swastika had been discovered at my high school that I went to.

And that really...

..hit me, that something was very, very wrong with our country.

Darcy took me for a spin in her Tesla

to the neighbouring town of Bridgeport,

and it seemed a world away.

What's the relationship of Bridgeport to Westport?

Well, proximity-wise it's incredibly close.

But in every other way, it's incredibly distant.

The inequality between Bridgeport and Westport is so vast,

it's about race and poverty.

And those are the two things that,

for some reason, aren't a big part of the conversation.

People like to argue about guns, you know, immigration laws,

they like to argue about women's health, abortion laws,

abortion bans.

Inequality is a difficult thing to bring up.

You can talk about the kind of culture war, so to speak. Right.

But you can't talk about their really economic

and social issues that are at the base of it. Right.

What's wonderful about Westport is that people are fighting

for things that don't affect them.

I mean, you see people on the bridge screaming about, you know,

immigration laws and they're not immigrants.

You know, we don't really have immigrants in Westport.

The people that do their gardens might be immigrants though?

That's for sure.

When I come home and I, you know,

lie by my pool it feels very...

..ah, dirty sometimes.

I feel very guilty and very, like, I don't want anybody to see me

doing this, because it's not fair.

It's just not fair, you know, and...

But you're not going to give it up?

Of course I'm not going to give up my life, but I give.

You're a liberal, but you wouldn't describe yourself as a socialist?

No, no.

You know what? I wish I was a socialist.

That's what it is. I'm a...

..aspiring, that's my ideal...

..is to just be able to say, you know, "Here you go."

Wouldn't it be lovely if you were just an arch capitalist?

Right. And all you cared about was making money?

Yeah, oh, my God, life would be so easy. It would be, wouldn't it?

I'd go to sleep, I would sleep soundly.

I look at the ballot paper sometimes and I think it would be so easy

to be a right-winger. Yeah.

I wouldn't have the guilt...

Life is so simple!

You don't have to worry about anybody else

but yourself and your family... Yeah, it would be... Your money.

Talking about the guilt and shame,

they do seem central to...

..erm, a lot of the experience of the people

I've been talking to in various ways.

Their ecological values, their educational values,

their personal values.

They're all good, but they all seem to add up to an exclusiveness.

Yeah, and then what happens is the perception is,

look at all these people who stand for these ideals.

They're all wealthy, they're all educated,

they're all living in this part of the country

because that's where the wealthy, educated people tend to live.

It's not helping them at all, because they're seen as elitist,

out of touch.

And they are, terribly out of touch,

erm, with working class America and poor America.

And I'm one of those people.

Because Westport's a bubble, I mean, it is part of a very,

very, very thick-skinned bubble.

I mean, time and time again we've all been surprised

by our own countrymen,

you know, on elections and round certain social issues,

and the surprise shouldn't be a surprise, you know,

if we knew more about who we live with in this country,

but we're constantly shocked.

It shows when we're shocked that we've been living in a bubble.

Darcy is one of the very few people I've met on this journey

who's willing to admit they're a member of the liberal elite.

But everything I've seen confirms for me that they -

hey, let's be honest about it, we - are indeed a thing.

What's happening in the US is happening in the UK.

Growing division caused by inequality is an issue

here as well as there.

And if its beneficiaries want to escape the consequences,

they're going to need a bigger boat.

Through the kind of invisible forces of education

and the coded language and the shared politics and values

and little, sort of, tasteful messages they're giving out

left, right and centre about their food and their houses and whatever,

they're kind of making an exclusionary barrier

and it has a real effect on other people,

it keeps them out.

And I think that this group does not want to admit to it.

Because they are good, they're not doing it on purpose!

But...

..I think they've got to look at themselves, because...

..the liberal elite, they've kind of taken their eye off the ball

and there's an elephant in the room that is the consequence of them

not paying attention to the rest of America

and that elephant has got fuzzy yellow hair and a very orange tan.

And I think Mr Trump...

..is the result of their complacency.

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