Road to Somewhere
* Book: The Road to Somewhere. David Goodhart.
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Description
John Lloyd:
"After Brexit, Goodhart found popular fame with his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, in which he described the world, or at least the European part of it, as divided between the Anywheres and the Somewheres. The former are cosmopolitans who see the nation as a malleable institution with inconvenient borders to be transcended wherever possible, especially by commerce; the latter live a life more closely defined by place, family, friendship circles, and occupation. The conceptual division Goodhart identified is now routinely referenced to show a nodding acquaintanceship with a social problem: Anywhere and Somewhere people are used, all but universally, to describe a fundamental schism at the heart of the Western world.
The Anywheres, overwhelmingly drawn from the more affluent end of society, still determine most of our politics, economy, and social relations. The Somewheres, for their part, have become more restive, and trade unions are showing signs of growth following a long decline, while the new far-Right parties report, in many cases, that the bulk of their supporters are from the working class. The Anywheres tend to be the highly educated, the Somewheres less so. In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, American philosopher Michael Sandel describes a US similarly divided, in which the Anywheres increasingly define personal and institutional progress by “aligning worldly success with moral deservingness,” while large numbers of the Somewheres continue to service their needs.
Goodhart had found a phrase that seemed to describe one of the essential features of the modern West—a great gash dividing the rich from the poor, high from low status, and comfortable affluence from relative hardship. Citizens may be equal in the abstract quality of their citizenship, but they are unequal in the homes and places in which they can afford to live. It is from the latter cohort that Donald Trump and other populists draw much of their support. “For seven years,” Trump told an entranced crowd in Georgia earlier this year, “we’ve been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the sinister forces within who hate it. … And on November 5th, 2024, we’re going to stand up to the corrupt political establishment.”