I began this page in August 2024, in parallel with a reading of the below-mentioned “Coming Apart”, but was stuck on other matters until the page was forgotten. The contents at this juncture were mostly the introduction and a discussion of “Murray’s quiz” (cf. below) that was present in a separate document (which I, to my very great annoyance, cannot find).
I published the page with a cleaned-up version of rudimentary contents end of November 2025, with the intent of slowly fleshing it out.
For natural reasons, the page so written is (will be) different from the one that I originally set out to write, including that the strong original connection with “Coming Apart” has grown far weaker. I have some keywords and headings that will be used for my work, but my take at the time of respective writing is likely to be different from my take at the time of original conception even here. (I have included the headings with a dummy text of TBD, for the first publication, but have kept the keywords back. The exact headings used might change as the contents develop.)
My own life has given me an odd intersection of what is often called “classes”. (I dislike this term, but it is established and will do in this context.) I also find that I often have seemingly paradoxical or unusual takes on elitism.
Looking at Murray’s “Coming Apart”, it might seem that I would be solidly in the “elite” or “fancy” camp, having two master’s degrees, with studies at some highly renowned Swedish and German schools, a great range of intellectual interests, a typical group of colleagues where a bachelor is the minimum education, etc. The reality is, in many ways, very different.
In the continuation, I will discuss some related issues.
While I will not go into this sub-issue below, I note that my focus on STEM topics might have made a difference in terms of formal education, as STEM students can be more down-to-earth than students of other fields (business, in particular).
Looking at politics, it is also possible that the less politicized and indoctrinating environment of STEM, compared to some “liberal arts” colleges, the social sciences, etc., was a help. Further, that Sweden and Germany might have trailed the U.S. in terms of such deterioration of education.
However, the topic of this text and of Murray’s book is not the Leftwards drift of those higher in education, but issues around elitism, “class”, and a split of society. (Murray even argues that this drift, at least at his time of writing, had been considerably overstated.)
I will often use the term “plugger”, drawing on the comic strip “Pluggers”. (I have never encountered the term elsewhere, beyond those who e.g. plug holes.) This strip features very down-to-earth working class anthropomorphic animals who go about their lives. While the term, as such, is poorly defined, just reading a handful of the strips will give the reader roughly the right idea. My use of the term might be a bit more extensive in at least two regards, however: Firstly, the pluggers of the strip tend to be either working, housewives, or kids. While I will typically have my eyes on such cases, it is possible that much will apply to less savory groups, like layabouts who do not share the work ethic so often displayed in the strip, and or groups that lack the quite contentment that often seems present. Secondly, a wider net might sometimes apply in terms of e.g. professions. (Both in particular when applied to “Coming Apart”, cf. below. To some degree, the characters of “Pluggers” represent an ideal that Murray views as dying in his “Fishtown”.)
Even with such potential weaknesses, I stick to term, because many of my own retrospective thoughts have come exactly from reading “Pluggers”. (Housewife scenes and memories of my maternal grandmother have been particularly common.)
The thesis of “Coming Apart” is that the U.S. is becoming increasingly divided between a “fancy” and a “plugger” side (with a large group in between that largely goes undiscussed). On the one side, members have fancy degrees, fancy jobs, fancy cars, fancy opinions, whatnot, and reside in a metaphorical “Belmont”; on the other, we have variations on the plugger theme, residing in the equally metaphorical “Fishtown”. The problem is that those on the fancy side have a too poor understanding of what life is like on the plugger side. (Especially, through the high proportion of friends, colleagues, and similar who are typically also on the fancy side.) The same applies in reverse, but is far less of a problem, because of who does and does not have influence in society/politics/whatnot.
For some of the below, note that the year of completion was 2011 (going by the acknowledgements), and that the extended title includes the interval 1960–2010 (“The State of White America 1960–2010”), while my time of writing was/is either 2024 or 2025–.
TBD
TBD
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“Coming Apart” includes a quiz in the Chapter “How Thick Is Your Bubble”, which aims at giving the reader a chance to answer that question—the bubble amounting to how isolated the (presumed to be fancy) reader is from those on the plugger side of the divide.
I wrote a fair bit about my own results and the quiz, but (as noted) cannot find the corresponding text. For now, a brief recapitulation from memory and a skimming of the quiz and Murray’s comments/“answer key”. (I will amend this if and when I find that missing text.)
Recapitulation:
After making some allowances for nationality and the like, I did quite well, often because of a strong exposure to pluggers in my childhood (note an above section on my family background).
Such allowances begin with the first question, which references an “American neighborhood” and asks whether the reader has lived in such a neighborhood where a majority of neighbors lacked college degrees. I have never set foot in America, be it in the proper sense or in the sense of the U.S., and would score poorly on the question in its literal form. Remove the word “American” or substitute one of “Swedish” and “German”, and I score well.
The implications of such allowances, then, are that I do not necessarily know much about the life of a specifically U.S. plugger beyond what follows from what I know about the life of Swedish and German pluggers. When and whether such a limitation is of importance is a tricky question. Looking at Swedish pluggers, we have a similar limitation in that it is closing to thirty years since I left Sweden and that my main plugger impressions came at a time before I entered college, more than thirty years ago. When and whether that limitation is of importance is another tricky question.
However, there were quite a few U.S. centric questions on which I did well through sheer exposure to various U.S. fiction, news, and whatnot. For instance, the “Branson” of question 25 was something that I knew of.
That question also illustrates how tricky it is to make proper allowances, and why I do not bother to say more than “I did quite well”: the nominal scoring gives 2 points for knowing and 4 points for having visited. Should I, then, give myself 2-out-of-4 or adjust the scaling as if I reached 2-out-of-2, as a visit would be far less reasonable to expect from someone who has never been to the U.S. than from a U.S. resident? (A key consideration might be that I suspect that I would have been unlikely to ever visit, had I been a U.S. resident.)
I found quite a few questions poorly posed and/or missing the point that Murray is trying to make/the test that he tries to give the reader. For instance, question 14 asks about buying domestic mass-market beer to stock a fridge in the last year. In 2024 (and 2025) I can truthfully answer that question with “yes”—in most other years, it would be “no”. Does it really matter whether the beer is domestic? (The “mass-market” part is easier to understand; of course, my “yes” above was with regards to domestic German beer.) If specifically stocking the fridge, as opposed to e.g. drinking in a bar, matters, does it matter more that the fridge is stocked or what type of beer is used? What about the pluggers who do not drink at all, who prefer wine, or who experiment with fancier beers? Etc. Looking at the “answer key”, Murray might think so, because the idea seems to be that those on the fancy side of the divide have a particularly strong disdain for specifically domestic mass-market beer—but whether that makes the question a good check is disputable and it is far from certain that that question actually tests well for that disdain and/or a general snobbery with regard to beers, a beer–wine divide, or similar. To boot, it tests a potentially very current (at the time of Murray’s writing) attitude that need not hold at other times.
An interesting question is why there is a disdain (assuming that Murray is correct regarding its existence). Consider e.g. the contrasting potential interpretations of a disdain that has arisen out of snobbery or an underlying disdain for pluggers and their habit vs. a disdain based in an objective judgment of the quality of such mass-market beers.
How to do it better is a tricky question because of issues like how much weight should be given to Murray resp. a more general view, what I might misjudge about the U.S. as a Swede living in Germany, and similar. However, I might have gone with a more nuanced set of questions, on the lines of “Do you prefer beer or wine?”, “Do you drink at home or only in public settings?”, “Do you frown upon domestic mass-market beers?”, or similar. With reservations for the risk of alienating a sensitive reader, a more targeted question about snobbery with regard to e.g. drinking habits might have worked well. Another angle might be to probe for price sensitivity and/or how a quality–quantity or price–quality prioritization is handled.
This question illustrated two issues with time, namely, that both personal habits and testable attitudes can vary over time (especially, as generations change and as the individuals within a generation grow older). A similar issue is even more manifest in question 22, which lists a number of top movies of 2010—to boot, with a restriction to theatre or DVD (i.e. no other disc format, no streaming, whatnot). This might or might not have worked at the time, but need not be of much value today. Looking at specifically my own watching, I do not only watch fewer movies today than back then, but I only rarely watch something current, because of the massive quality issues with modern (mainstream) movie making.
For such a test, it might be better to ask the reader something like how many of last year’s top movies he has watched in any format and/or how many of the last decade’s top movies. (With “last” used relative the time of reading and quiz taking.) Other relevant questions, depending on how this might vary by demographic, might include whether someone uses pirated sources and how many visits to a non-artsy movie theater someone has in some time period vs. the number of visits to artsy movie theaters, actual theaters, whatnot.
Chances are that some type of age restriction might be needed, as age and/or generation might be more important than fancy vs. plugger.