Anywheres and Somewheres - the map is not the terrain

From The Revolt of the Somewheres: II by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby.  The subheading is The politics of the institutionally alienated and culturally repressed.  The distinction being explored is this.  

Social commentator David Goodhart has usefully identified two broad groups in modern developed democracies.

About half the population in modern developed democracies are (on average) less educated Somewheres, whose identity and social connections are very much bound up in a local community where they are born, marry, work, raise children and die. Around a quarter of the population are (on average) highly educated—and mobile—Anywheres whose networks are not based in a local community.

The previous essay in this series explored national populism in older Western democracies (dynamics in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have significant differences) as a revolt of the Somewheres.

Once you see the Anywheres/Somewheres division, it becomes hard to un-see; forms of it reach deep into history. It is precisely the Somewhere patterns of repeated local marriage and highly localised lives and connections that create and sustain ethnicities: that is, locality-based dialects, folkways and genetic clusterings.

Source: Leslie et al.

Most aristocracies are Anywheres: much of the Russian aristocracy, for example, was not Russian in its origins. Academics—particularly in the Anglosphere—tend to be Anywheres. Anywheres not only dominate written sources from the past, they dominate our interrogation of the past.

Anywhere domination and Somewhere alienation

In most contemporary Western societies, Anywheres also dominate bureaucracies, the media, non-profits, and lobbyists. They dominate the mainstream political Parties: the politicians, staffers, and Party activists are typically Anywheres. Public debate is overwhelmingly by and between Anywheres and about Anywhere concerns.

Journalism used to be pervaded, even dominated, by jobbing Somewheres. Often working-class lads (and some lasses) made good. Whatever the power of newspaper owners, mass market newspapers were mostly Somewheres talking to Somewheres.

As university credentialism advanced, newspapers (and the media more broadly) over time became Anywheres talking to Anywheres. In accordance with the modern university’s capacity to screw anything up, increasingly toxic status-and-social-leverage games have proliferated within media and its consumption. These are sabotaging the capacity of modern societies to talk to themselves.

I would add that the Anywheres deal in abstractions of concepts.  They are entertained by notions of what could be without ever dealing with real world constraints and limitations, without asking who is affected in what way, to what end and whether those affected consent to the conceptual abstraction being proposed.  Questions which are at the forefront for Somewheres who are solving jointly acknowledged problems with real-world consequences to people whom they know, acknowledge and respect.  

Anywheres, plot a route on a map and consider that the journey.  The fact that the map is not the terrain is abstracted away.  Somewheres actually make the journey in the vehicle, in the weather, on the road surface.  They deal with getting there.