"Hillbilly" from America

In the United States, there is such a group. While watching how elite white people become more prominent with the acceleration of globalization and climb to the top of the social ladder, they are busy coping with sudden unemployment and find that their lives have fallen to the bottom in these years.

They are not black, Latino or Asian, but white farmers and workers in the vast land of the Midwest of the United States.

Yes, their skin color is no different from those of white Americans who live in villas with lawns, have two dogs and own two or three cars, but they seem to be incompatible with the upper-middle class white people in the rich areas of the northeast and west of the United States in every way.

They are called hillbillies, which means "hillbillies from remote areas" in English.

They may be paunchy, flushed, and their teeth are irregularly arranged. Under the gray stubble, four words are clearly written: slovenly, that is the impression of the older generation of hillbillies. But their descendants may become like that in a few years, because most of them can only work part-time in factories in the midwest or stay at home. Few of them can go to college, and it is not easy to go to a community college, let alone an Ivy League school.

On the day when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and was elected as the 45th president of the United States, the whole world was shocked, except these American "hillbillies". American universities, the media, and everyone close to the elite can't believe the election results. When I woke up and walked to the classroom, the professor cried and the minority students were very sad. Everyone is not in the mood for class. There is no American friend on Facebook who does not oppose Trump. It seems that the whole world is laughing at him as a madman and an extreme businessman.

From the beginning of Trump and Hillary Clinton's campaign, Trump has been elected for a month now, and the media's views on presidential candidate Trump and current President Trump are always unfriendly and ironic.

Maybe you will be confused at this time. Who chose Trump?

At the end of 65438+February last year, a poll in Washington post showed that the voters who supported Trump were mainly white men with no college education and an annual income of less than $50,000. Many of them are hillbillies, or their grandparents are hillbillies. They are "hillbillies" from mountainous areas, and they are the silent majority.

You see, they are not among the people holding big billboards and marching in the streets, nor among the people who are active and commenting on social networks, not to mention the subtle news reports in the media, where their voices can't be heard.

Their ancestors came to the industrialized central areas such as Ohio from mountainous areas such as the Appalachian Mountains in the 1930s and 1940s, looking for ways to transform into middle-class life in the industrialized era. But the local character in their bones has not changed, and they have never really integrated into this city. They can kill chickens cruelly in the backyard, making elegant and gentle urban ladies dumbfounded; You can yell at the serious supermarket cashier because he is careless and offends. In their inherent concept, the power of individual behavior always precedes legal justice. Different from the intimate relationship based on nuclear family in modern American cities, they are still the concept of a big family, and all relatives have the right to participate in the decision-making of a small family.

They don't care about equal rights, and they don't want to know if everyone's American dream can come true. In their eyes, they just want to have a stable job and a stable life for themselves and their families. Foreign immigrants are not here to rob the younger generation of their jobs. The terror from the Middle East is as far away from them as possible.

After coming to the city, most of them are engaged in blue-collar jobs, working as cheap labor in mines or factories, and their families are full of violence, drug addiction and even jail. According to a sociological survey conducted by the Pew Economic Mobility Project, these working classes have the lowest expectations for their descendants to surpass themselves economically. Their desire to work hard is getting lower and lower, because they can't see the hope of harvesting returns.

The government gives preferential treatment and welfare to blacks and other ethnic minorities, but these indigenous whites get nothing, which is extremely unfair to them. Especially some white working-class people who work at the bottom, when they are in the supermarket, they can see that those who are lazy and unemployed all day can still get food stamps to buy things. Neighbors rent nearby houses at very cheap prices, but they get government subsidies without doing anything. After all, the source of this money is the taxes they pay for their hard work every day.

They need someone who really cares about them to change the status quo. Obviously, neither Obama nor Hillary is such a person.

For them, Hillary is the representative of the elite. She will only claim to protect homosexuality, protect black Americans, protect women and give immigrants equal opportunities, but these seem to only make Hillary's life worse.

They are used to blaming the government for their problems, and their distrust of government policies has reached a climax. In life, they regard diligence as a virtue and at the same time make excuses for their laziness. "We don't have a job because Obama closed the coal plant, because our factory moved to China, and those China people took our jobs."

They make people feel pitiful and hateful, make people lament their misfortune and hate their indisputable.

In a family full of violence, drugs and instability, it is almost impossible for children to get a peaceful environment and motivation to learn, and parents simply don't care how different their children are from community colleges. As a result, the education level of their descendants has failed to keep up with the pace of national modernization.

They hate Hillary because she has a perfect accent, she always wears decent clothes, and she received the best education from an Ivy League school. In short, Hillary is completely different from them. She represents the elite with the strongest American dream, and this elite is increasingly out of reach for the white working class.

How can the government help these people and their descendants from the source?

We have to admit that some problems are deeply rooted in family and cultural values, and no simple public policy or social innovation can eradicate them. However, in addition to paying attention to mainstream contradictions, the government should also pay more attention to these silent majority. Their life is not a macroeconomic policy, and social services are indispensable to support the combination of family, school and society to cultivate and help working-class children.

The contradictions and struggles of these American "country bumpkins" are similar to the urban-rural migration in China to some extent. Since the 1990s, migrant workers have been pouring into big cities, which seems to be the reappearance of white farmers who walked out of the Appalachian Mountains in the 1930s and 1940s. None of them have received higher education, and their skills can only be used for them to work in labor-intensive enterprises. However, unlike China, these white American workers are facing huge unemployment as American labor-intensive manufacturing industries move overseas.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, the United States began to reflect on its economic development model, hoping to revive the manufacturing industry. But the manufacturing industry that the United States wants to revive is no longer labor-intensive manufacturing industry, but manufacturing industry based on cutting-edge technology. In this case, the level of workers employed by the factory must also be improved accordingly. If we just force the country bumpkins with low education to do these jobs, the consequences will be unimaginable. Not long ago, in a factory in Central America, a 20-year-old female worker died because of improper operation of an automatic machine, which seemed to be a warning to the government to blindly increase job opportunities without making efforts in training and education.

Trump came to power because of the support of most white working-class Americans. He declared that he would fight for the rights and interests of these forgotten people. He said that this group of people have been hurt too deeply by the wave of globalization. A huge challenge that Trump is facing now comes from this group of people. He must do well enough to live up to their expectations.

Everyone thinks Trump will be different from those elites. He was worried about the threat of Muslims to national security, so he issued a travel ban against Muslim countries. He hates illegal immigrants and even wants to build a high wall on the US-Mexico border. He supported trade protectionism and announced the withdrawal of the United States from the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) within a few days of taking office. If he doesn't play by common sense, will there really be any constructive measures?

At least this month, Trump's performance was disappointing. He spoke ill of the court on the travel ban that restricted the entry of seven Muslim countries. When asked about the revision and introduction of medical and tax policies, he was evasive to the media. His national security assistant resigned because he privately discussed the US sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States. This is a chaotic month.

However, the president's four-year term has just begun. What Trump will do next, let us wait and see.