DONALD TRUMP won few friends with his off-the-cuff remarks on August 15th, when he addressed recent violence between white supremacists and left-wing counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. At a press conference in the foyer of his eponymous skyscraper in New York, he said that both sides were to blame, and that the far-right demonstrators chanting “Jews will not replace us” included some “very fine people”. Democrats raced to condemn the president’s comments, and many of his fellow Republicans criticised them harshly as well.

The pretext for the far-right groups’ demonstration was a proposal to remove a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general during America’s Civil War, from a park in Charlottesville. Two days later Mr Trump poured further fuel on the fire by tweeting his support for preserving monuments to Confederate soldiers and leaders. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” the president wrote. He warned that memorials to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, revered former presidents who also owned slaves, might be taken down next, and bemoaned the resulting loss of “beauty” in the country’s public spaces.

Mr Trump’s establishment-minded advisors, already concerned that the president was branding Republicans as the party of intolerance, grimaced at the messages. After all, Lee and his ilk were indisputably traitors to America: they launched an armed rebellion against the United States government that left roughly 750,000 people dead. Moreover, the resounding consensus among historians is that the Confederacy’s primary motivation for secession was to forestall the possibility that the federal government might try to stop them from enslaving African-Americans. And arguments that Confederate monuments merely honour Southern “heritage” and fallen soldiers’ bravery are ahistorical at best. When the statue of Lee was completed in 1924, the general’s great-granddaughter unveiled it by pulling away a Confederate flag draped over it. The park housing it was donated to Charlottesville on the condition that it remain racially segregated. The Lee statue is representative of a broader pattern: according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an advocacy group, 55% of Confederate monuments went up between 1900 and 1920, just when Jim Crow segregation laws were becoming entrenched in Southern states.

Yet despite these concerns, Mr Trump’s political instincts may have been disconcertingly keen. His tweets both reiterated that he would never give ground to his critics and shifted the debate from the merits of modern white supremacists to the legacy of the Civil War. And whereas hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi organisations are overwhelmingly unpopular, public opinion regarding tributes to the men who actually fought a war to preserve slavery is far more favourable.

As the violence in Charlottesville unfolded during the weekend of August 12th YouGov, a polling firm, asked 1,500 Americans their opinion regarding the removal of the statue of Lee. Only 30% of respondents said that they supported it. In contrast, fully 48% said that they either “strongly disapproved” or “somewhat disapproved”, meaning that they wanted the monument to remain in place. If Mr Trump was looking for an issue that would unite his followers while outraging his opponents, he could hardly have chosen better: 63% of respondents who said they voted for the president in 2016 “strongly disapproved” of the removal, compared with just 10% among those who said they backed Hillary Clinton.

As you might expect, race and geography were powerful predictors of feelings about honouring the Confederacy. Overall, 33% of blacks said they strongly supported the removal, whereas just 4% strongly opposed it. The corresponding figures for whites were 16% and 40%. Such sentiments are particularly common among Southern whites: within the region that started the war, strong disapproval among whites increases to 46%. Further differences among subgroups of black respondents also stand to reason. The most favourable views of taking down the statue are held by blacks over the age of 65 (who grew up under segregation) with college degrees (making them more likely to be informed about the history of the Civil War).

Among white respondents, however, no similar pattern emerged. In fact, the group of whites with the highest rate of “strong disapproval” of taking down the statue was college graduates aged 30-44. That suggests that attitudes are not necessarily growing more liberal or tolerant with each generation, and that education is no panacea for Confederate nostalgia. The fact that so many Americans appear susceptible to romanticising Confederate generals in what was America’s greatest national trauma only strengthens the argument for retiring their monuments from the public square, and displaying them in museums where they belong.