IN CULLMAN, ALABAMA, the strawberry festival is in full swing. A community band is playing a medley of Beatles numbers interspersed with patriotic songs while people browse the stalls or wait for a turn on the bucking bronco. On stage Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed by Alabama’s governor when Jeff Sessions became attorney-general, is reminding the crowd that he is on the Senate’s agriculture committee, so they might want to vote for him in the Republican primary in August. Alabama’s voters remain very enthusiastic about Mr Trump, he says afterwards. They “recognise he’s trying to turn the ship around” and tend to blame Congress for any reversals.

Cullman was founded as a German colony after the civil war and remains 96% white, according to the Census Bureau, though there are some migrant workers in nearby poultry plants. Woody Jacobs, Cullman’s (Republican) mayor, says there are a lot of illegal immigrants in the region, but that most people regard them as friends and co-workers. “People don’t want them to go. But they will also say, ‘we need to secure the border and get rid of the illegals’.” Asked how much of politics in northern Alabama is about race, he replies, with the patience of a man who has been asked this a few times before, that it really is not. “There’s an African-American town near here called Colony,” he says, “and I believe they voted for Trump.”

Over in Colony the voters do not seem so sure. Sitting in the Methodist church, Earlene Johnson says quietly that there was “a nice turnout at the town hall” on election night and that most people in Colony in fact voted for Mrs Clinton (the voting returns from the town hall confirm this: she took 64% of the 300 ballots cast). Outside the church is a graveyard with headstones that date back to the late 19th century. Colony was settled in the brief window during Reconstruction when former slaves might be granted 40 acres and a mule, and has remained African-American ever since. Aside from that it would be hard to distinguish from many other small towns in the South: people driving vast pickups, saying “y’all” and greeting visitors from the porches of bungalows that were towed in by truck and deposited in place. Mrs Johnson, who remembers the nearby schools being integrated, says that the troubles between the races are largely over now.

That is true, yet people still vote along racial lines, and not just in the South. To try to get at voters’ attitudes to people of other races, the ANES has asked a series of questions designed to measure racial resentment (such as “do you agree that blacks would get ahead if only they tried harder?”). Academics who study these responses debate whether they really reflect racism or whether they just pick up attitudes to subjects like welfare and affirmative action. Still, it is hard to argue that these questions have nothing to do with race, says Michael Tesler of the University of California, Irvine. When Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, those who scored highly on racial-resentment questions were more likely to back Mrs Clinton. When she ran against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, that pattern disappeared. Republican primary voters who scored highly on racial-resentment questions were more likely to back Mr Trump than other candidates. To dismiss the anger that the president taps into as racism is “intellectual comfort food”, writes Joan Williams, the author of “White Working Class”. Some old-fashioned racism is indeed in evidence: when people show up with burning torches to protest against the removal of Confederate memorials, it is hard to call it anything else. But this kind of thing attracts attention because it is rare. There has been a marked decline in the racist attitudes prevalent in places like Cullman even 20 years ago. One simple measure of progress on race, the share of people who approve of marriage between whites and non-whites, rose from 48% in 1995 to 87% in 2013, according to Gallup.

What remains when old-fashioned hard racism evaporates is a residue of unconscious bias and a tendency for people to sympathise more with those of their own racial group. Republicans have long denounced Democrats for pursuing identity politics, but there is no other sort. Just as cities with large African-American populations tend to prefer African-American mayors, Trump voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have a marked preference for helping other white people. In 2016 the ANES asked voters how important it was for whites to work together to change laws that are unfair to whites. A large share of Trump voters thought this either “extremely” or “very” important (see chart). The number for Clinton voters was lower but still considerable, given what a big part anti-racism plays in the make-up of the modern Democratic Party.

The belief of many whites that life has become unfair and needs rebalancing in their favour is connected to feelings of fear and of mourning for something lost, says Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers In Their Own Land”, a book about conservative Louisiana published before the election. Ms Hochschild has since been back to check on some of the people she wrote about to see what they make of the president’s progress. They are exhilarated to have a president who “recognises” them, she says. Most of her interviewees were the elite of Mr Trump’s left-behind America, people who had struggled hard to get to community or Bible college. They were pleased that Mr Trump took their side against more recent arrivals in America, who seemed to be queue-jumping. They also liked the way he freed them from what Ms Hochschild calls “liberal feeling rules”, a set of attitudes to minorities, gay people, women and the poor that Trump supporters found oppressive. Race was seldom mentioned; in fact some of Mrs Hochschild’s subjects said they looked forward to the day when skin colour counted for nothing. The mourning is bound up with perceptions of status that are partly about skin tone and partly about the passing of a labour market when a man could support a family with one stable, albeit occasionally dangerous, job. This attitude is shared by a lot of women, Ms Hochschild found, who liked the president’s promises to protect their husband’s jobs, or to return America to a time when they themselves did not have to work. Half of Trump voters believe it is “better if a man works and a woman stays at home”, against only a quarter of Clinton voters. That change has been understood in terms of race. “A lot of people said they saw what had happened to blacks three decades ago when they took the first hit from deindustrialisation. Their families are a mess. And now it’s our turn,” says Ms Hochschild. Being alarmed about a relative loss of status is not racist, but views about status are conditioned by race. During the Obama presidency, black Americans were consistently more optimistic about the future than whites. Since the election, economic confidence among whites has soared.

The price of prosperity

This might seems like a straightforward case of economic hardship fuelling support for the president. Yet once again there is more to it than that. In an essay published in 1955, “The Sources of the Radical Right”, Seymour Martin Lipset tried to explain why the post-war boom, now remembered as a golden era for the economy, also gave rise to paranoid political movements such as the John Birch Society and to McCarthyism. He thought that when the economy was growing or stable, some groups of Americans developed “status anxiety” about being eclipsed by others. “In the United States, political movements or parties which stress the need for economic reform have usually gained strength during times of unemployment and depression,” he wrote. “On the other hand, status politics becomes ascendant in periods of prosperity.”

According to Lipset, “the political consequences of status frustrations are very different from those resulting from economic deprivation, for while in economic conflict the goals are clear—a redistribution of income—in status conflict there are no clear-cut solutions. Where there are status anxieties, there is little or nothing a government can do.” Political movements that have successfully appealed to status resentments, in Lipset’s view, tend to seek convenient scapegoats. “Historically, the most common scapegoats in the United States have been the minority ethnic or religious groups.” The results from the ANES, which showed that half of Trump voters thought Barack Obama was a Muslim, seem to confirm Lipset’s findings.

One of the puzzles of current American politics is why Mr Trump’s brand of right-wing populism flourished at a point when the financial crisis was over, the country was nearing full employment and the S&P 500 was setting new records. If Lipset was right, the widespread view that the Trump presidency is the result of economic distress, and that the underlying attitudes can be assuaged with the right policies, may be misleading.

Like most voters, the president’s supporters do not really know what they want from him. They do, however, have a strong sense that he takes their side against those groups of Americans who are against them. That gives Mr Trump a lot of leeway on what he can do without losing their support.