we need more nuanced terminology than “populists” versus “elites.” Thankfully, David Goodhart, a British author affiliated with the London think tank Policy Exchange and the founding editor of Prospect, offers just that. In his forthcoming book, The Road to Somewhere, Goodhart sees “two rival value blocks” that are setting people at odds with each other: those who see the world from anywhere versus those who see the world from somewhere. Educated and mobile, the Anywheres value autonomy, openness, and fluidity. They flourish in a globalized economy: If a software engineer loses his job in one city, he packs up and moves to another, with national boundaries posing little impediment. By contrast, the Somewheres are more rooted and less well educated. They value group attachments, familiarity, and security—they are deeply concerned about the welfare of particular places.
That is from Michael Doran and Peter Rough. I’ve been using the terms Abstract vs. Concrete, or Bobo vs. anti-Bobo. The Bobos are Anywheres because they could be comfortable anywhere among other members of the Abstract class. As I put it in The Three Languages of Politics, they are more comfortable in Prague than in Peoria. The Somewheres need to be located in their home town in order to work and to feel comfortable.
One can argue that the Somewheres and the Anywheres need one another, although neither side would admit it. The Anywheres have the competence in dealing with abstractions in the economy and government. The Somewheres have patriotic solidarity, without which the Anywheres might have their world broken up by face violence and chaos. Note, of course, that the libertarian line is that government is the chief source of violence and chaos, and if you go with that, then patriotic solidarity is a bug rather than a feature. I have trouble buying into this particular libertarian line.
By the way, Goodhart’s book is due to be available July 1.
One can argue that the Somewheres and the Anywheres need one another, although neither side would admit it.
These class differences have been around for ever and it is not just a 2016 thing. Again the 2016 voting difference was by education/race and not income. Trump winning low income voters is media nonsense and HRC won with voters under $75K per year if you include minority voters. (That was the difference of Trump versus European nationalism candidates like Le Pen in which Trump won high income voters.) How many speeches did we hear about Labor and Capital working together in WW2 and Post War era? Or can we look at the politics of Capital/Labor and farmers from the McKinnley era?
Of course the anywheres and somewheres need each other. Living in SoCal this analysis fails because we have plenty of ‘anywhere’ working class citizens who are nurses, clerks, agricultural pickers, landscapers, etc. The difference here is these jobs have become dominated by Hispanic-American populations (not illegal) and most of whom sound like a working class couple from the 1960s in which they working extra hard for their kids. In reality there are plenty of ‘white’ working class service employees here and interracial dating is vastly increasing. In reading libertarian economist, I still don’t understand the lamenting of the Rust Belt WWC communities when two days before you were celebrating the creative destruction of retail malls. (in which the WWC communities are going to be hit hardest here.)
I live in an Anywhere city, but have family connections in the world of the Somewheres.
Anywhere is an unsatisfying term in some respects. I find the Anywheres just as narrow-minded as the Somewheres. They don’t go anywhere — they live in Richard Florida’s spiky world. Anywheres go from one large spiky city to the next, with no clue about what life is like in between.
This is understandable. Most of us do not know what life is like in a rural agricultural small town. Anywheres, however, do not even seem to be aware of life in mid-sized towns all over the US.
That’s fine, but there’s a willful ignorance on the part of Anywheres about the world outside of their metropolis. Since they tend to work for companies with experienced HR, accounting, and legal departments, they have no consideration for the devastation and burdens placed upon Somewhereville from the bureaucratic administrative politics that they favor.
And yes, patriotic solidarity is more often a bug than a feature. Few entries in the long list of America’s wars and military interventions have had anything to do with protecting the country from violence and chaos.
Even disastrous social policy is often adorned with national solidarity trappings in order to get buy-in from those who are too often guilty of uncritical patriotism.
The divide is based on one’s stance towards freedom, inclusion and change, not place.
Anywhere serves as a placeholder for removing social and political barriers, so change happens faster. We know change can break things, but are confident that we can figure out how to pick up the pieces and end up in a better place.
Somewhere is a placeholder for using social and political power to slow or stop change.
Depends on the kind of change, doesn’t it? A lot has been written lately about the NIMBYism, anti-growth, anti-development, anti-sprawl, and all around anti-dynamist attitudes of our most Anywhere cities.
That’s a fair observation, but as I said, its a stance, not a place. The idea of an “Anywhere City” is a bit of an oxymoron. Very few of us are in one camp or the other in a pure sense. We pick and choose what types of change and how much we are comfortable with, but the camps mostly break down to “more” or “less” change.
“the libertarian line is that government is the chief source of violence and chaos, and if you go with that, then patriotic solidarity is a bug rather than a feature.”
Someone (Orwell?) defined pacifism as “a form of mental illness caused by strong navies”.
I view the Anywheres as the Incumbent Class, their power stemming not from “competence in dealing with abstractions in the economy and government” but from competence building and navigating complex status hierarchies and zero sum positional battles.
I view patriotic solidarity as analogous to the “betray” strategy in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Everyone would be better off if no one had it, but if your neighbors have it you suffer greatly if you don’t, and if they don’t have it and you do you get large gains from plundering them, so the individually rational strategy is to have it.
On this view, the Anywheres grasp the essential if snobbish-sounding truth that the world would be much better if everyone were like us. The Somewheres remind us of how difficult it is to get to that equilibrium, and how dangerous it is to think you’ve gotten there when you haven’t.
If you disagree with the Anywhere premise (that _if_ we could get to and preserve the fragile equilibrium of no patriotic solidarity, it would be great) I’m curious what evidence motivates that disagreement.
While I can appreciate a patriotic solidarity, I can’t really identify that with the shifting of friends and enemies based on short term advantage.
I hate the terminology. “Anywheres” are willing to live in many different geographical areas but they do not want to live outside their bubble. They are as uncomfortable living among gun nuts or fundamentalists as Southern Baptists are at a gay pride event.
Nor do I think “open to change”/”not open to change” is an accurate divider. “Anywheres” are open to some changes and very much closed to others. Many of them would be anti-dynamists in Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.
@Roger Sweeny
Can you give any examples of how “Anywheres” are closed to some types of change?
Anywheres tend to be historic preservationists: “you can’t change the character of this area.”
They tend to be big on the idea of drawing lines on a map and saying, “You can’t do anything new here.” Setting up “protected areas” and then limiting what happens nearby to protect the protected area. They tend to think of an ecosystem as some Platonic ideal that must be kept the way it is (when all ecosystems are just the latest still from a several billion year movie).
They generally support things like the Paris climate accord, which make growth more difficult.
They tend to want to “control change” or “direct change” by requiring permission from people like them. Many have a “precautionary principle” attitude about things that don’t benefit them. Like a Walmart.
I hope that’s responsive to your question.
As I put it in The Three Languages of Politics, they are more comfortable in Prague than in Peoria.
Caterpillar recently announced they’re moving their headquarters from Peoria to the Chicago area. The rumor was there was no way the new CEO’s wife was going to live in Peoria.
One more reason I hate “Education.”
We have not yet found the right labels for the Anywheres/Abstracts/Bobos (“elites”) and the Somewheres/Concretes/anti-Bobos (“non-elites”), but we know them when we see them.
W Bush was a non-elite, beating the elite Kerry. The phrase was that people “would rather have a beer” with W. Jeb was an elite, losing to Trump despite (because of?) being backed by the “Establishment” early. W and Jeb are brothers, raised by the same parents with identical socio-economic backgrounds. W attended Phillips Academy, Yale, and Harvard, which we usually associate with elites, but elites certainly do not count W as one of their own.
People may have forgotten that Bill Clinton, nicknamed Bubba, was also a non-elite in the 90s, beating the elite Bush Sr, father of non-elite W. Clinton was known for eating at McDonalds, bragging about some pickup truck lined with Astroturf (?), and being able to feel Americans’ pain. Today, after decades in DC and NYC, he is part of the elite camp. (I guess we could call him a trans-elite. Elite identification really is a state of mind with no physical basis.)
It’s hard to describe the identity groups such that brothers W and Jeb, and the same person Bill Clinton in two different time periods, fall into opposite groups.
As an aside, I have trouble trying to classify Reagan as either an elite or non-elite. He seemed to appeal intellectually to (right-wing) elites while simultaneously appealing intuitively to non-elites. He also simultaneously identified with both Hollywood glamour and a Western cowboy persona. That Reagan appealed to both elites and non-elites may explain his great success, but it may also explain the GOP’s current confusion about what the post-Reagan GOP should stand for.