Donald Trump, the political necromancer, has been able to manipulate the death anxieties of right-wing voters for his own political gain. Trump won the New Hampshire primary by a substantial margin. If current public opinion polls are accurate, he will also win the Republican South Carolina primary as well.

Trump’s base of white working-class authoritarians is scared of what they view as a “new” America, one in which they believe that the psychological and material wages of Whiteness will not be as great. A combination of the brain structures and cognitive processes of conservative-authoritarians, socialization by family and community, and disinformation from the right-wing “news” entertainment complex, reinforce those anxieties while also ginning up deep feelings of racial resentment toward non-whites.

Donald Trump is not necessarily the prime instigator or cause of those fears; he is just the Republican candidate who is most adept at manipulating them. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is a direct promise to restore a world where white folks are central to all things in the United States (to the degree that they are not), and their dominance, privilege and power are uncontested.

Approximately a week ago, I offered an essay here at Salon that examined Trump’s ability to manipulate his supporters’ death anxieties. In “Secrets of Donald Trump’s cult: This is why the angriest white voters will not leave his side,” I focused on the psychological concept known as “terror management theory” and its relationship to social scientist Seymour Lipset’s insights about “working-class authoritarianism.”

There, I wrote:

Biology, socialization and cultural norms influence how a given person manages their fear of death. The death anxiety also interacts with one’s political values. In some ways, conservative authoritarians manage their death anxieties differently than people who possess a “liberal” or “progressive” political personality type. Conservative authoritarians display high levels of nationalism, social dominance behavior, intolerance, out-group anxiety and bigotry, racism, a need for binary “yes” or “no” answers, a yearning for epistemic closure, and higher levels of religiosity. Terror management theory suggests that conservative authoritarians are especially prone to loving “the flag, guns, god, and religion” because these symbols and institutions are fixed points that will, in theory, outlive a given person.

Neuroscientists and social psychologists have determined that the brains of conservative authoritarians are especially sensitive to feelings of fear and disgust. Research on terror management theory complements those findings by showing that when scared or under threat, conservative authoritarians are more likely to become tribal, bigoted, racist and generally more hostile to those they identify as some type of Other.

The intersection of terror management theory and contemporary American conservatism is a profile of the Republican voter en masse, and Donald Trump supporters in particular.

Public opinion research has repeatedly shown that today’s Republican voters are angry, afraid and motivated by racial animus, white racial resentment and nativism. Because he is the id of contemporary conservatism, Donald Trump’s supporters display those worrisome and ugly traits in the extreme.

I concluded with the following observation:

In many mythological traditions, the necromancer controls the dead by using a drum or playing a song. These sounds trick the “living” corpse into thinking that it has a heartbeat. When the necromancer stops hitting the drum or ceases the music, the corpse reverts back to inert matter.

The political necromancer and cult leader Donald Trump beats a drum of nativism, fear, racism and sexism to control the right-wing political zombies that follow him. The problem is, unlike the undead ghouls of myth and folklore, once Donald Trump stops beating his metaphorical drum, his followers will not return to their graves. Trump’s people are now the walking dead of American political and cultural life, a group that threatens to devour us all.

Sheldon Solomon, one of the psychologists who did some of the first work on terror management theory, has recently completed a new paper that focuses on Donald Trump and how death anxieties relate to support for his campaign.

As indicated by Solomon’s new paper (written with co-author Florette Cohen) “You’re hired! Mortality Salience Increases Americans’ Support for Donald Trump,” matters may be worse than I suggested in my earlier essay.

Solomon and Cohen frame their new research on Donald Trump and terror management theory in the following way:

The 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign is occurring at a historical moment that is, from Max Weber’s perspective, ripe for the ascendance of a charismatic leader: economic uncertainty juxtaposed with environmental instability compounded by concerns about immigration magnified by ongoing threats of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists.  And Donald Trump has many characteristics of a (secular) charismatic leader: a powerful (i.e. rich) and self-assured public figure pledging to “Make America Great Again” and to keep U.S. citizens safe by stemming the tide of illegal immigrants from Mexico by building a wall at the border to keep out their “criminals” and “rapists,” “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and bombing “the shit out of ISIS.”

The paper’s conclusions include:

Among a sample of Americans, support for presidential candidate Donald Trump increased in response to reminders of death, consistent with previous research (Landau et al., 2004; Cohen et al., 2005) showing that MS increased support for President Bush by participants across the political spectrum. Overall, participants in the study did not have particularly favorable impressions of Mr. Trump, with mean support for him below the mid-point (5 = “somewhat” supportive) of the scale in both the control and MS conditions.  However, this makes the fact that support for Mr. Trump increased in response to the MS induction particularly interesting in that existing attitudes are typically polarized following death reminders; for example, Jong, Halberstadt, & Bluemke (2012) found that following an MS induction, participants who believed in God became more confident of God’s existence whereas atheists became more confident that God does not exist…

Although clearly additional research is in order to establish if the MS-induced boost in support for Donald Trump will persist closer to the 2016 presidential election (if he becomes the Republican candidate), this study adds to the burgeoning literature (reviewed by Cohen & Solomon, 2011) demonstrating that subtle alterations in psychological conditions have a pronounced effect on political preferences.  This could have ominous implications for democracy in that public policy and electoral outcomes should ideally result from rational deliberations rather than defensive reactions to mortal terror.

These findings are especially worrisome given that the sample was focused on young college age students (a group not likely to support Trump) who did not have a particularly strong predisposition or orientation to support Trump’s campaign. Given what is known about death anxiety, authoritarianism, age and political values, this dynamic can only be expected to be even more extreme among Donald Trump’s base.

In all, there is a clear relationship between terror management theory, conservative-authoritarianism and an embrace of “Trumpmania.”

As another complement to Sheldon Solomon’s new research (as well as the claims I made in my earlier essay), the intoxicating and noxious power of working-class authoritarianism for Trump supporters, specifically, and for Republican voters, in general, has been further buttressed by new research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.