David Goodhart's distinction between Anywheres and Somewheres describes a recognisable tension. Some people can take their skills and sense of identity almost anywhere. Others feel that who they are is closely bound up with a particular place.
Neither description captures a whole person. Someone can be well-travelled and deeply attached to home. A person rooted in one town can be curious about the rest of the world. Still, the distinction helps explain disagreements that income or party allegiance alone don't.
An older disagreement
Globalisation and mass higher education have changed the opportunities available to mobile people. They haven't invented the tension between mobility and attachment.
A port and its surrounding countryside can look at the same country differently. So can a person whose work takes them between cities and a person whose livelihood depends on one local community. History offers plenty of conflicts between people with wider networks and those whose interests are more closely tied to a place.
That doesn't make every modern dispute a repetition of the past. It suggests we should be cautious about treating the division itself as something one policy could remove.
Whose attachments get respected?
The imbalance matters when people comfortable with mobility hold influence over institutions serving people who are less mobile. A decision that looks like an opportunity to someone who can relocate may look like a threat to someone whose family, work and support are all nearby.
Calling that attachment backward doesn't answer the concern. Neither does treating everyone with an international outlook as disloyal. Countries benefit from people who bring knowledge and connections from elsewhere, as well as people who maintain the communities others move through.
The task is to make those interests answerable to one another. Institutions need to understand the lives of people who can't simply leave when a decision goes wrong. People with strong local attachments also need a fair account of what exchange and movement can contribute.
We won't make everyone equally rooted or equally mobile. We could do better at governing a country that contains both.