Paul Levy lives in Concord.

A recent AP article in the Monitor (1/4) described Donald Trump’s promise to begin the largest deportation operation in American history even surpassing “Operation Wetback” conducted in 1954 during the Eisenhower administration. The article noted Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and the callous proposals advanced by him and the GOP. And, it noted how these fit anti-immigrant, especially anti-Mexican, themes in American history.

But the article left out another revealing link, one that relates Operation Wetback to the modern National Rifle Association (NRA). This link involves the story of Harlon Carter. In 1950, at age 37, Carter became director of the U.S. Border Patrol, the patrol’s youngest director ever. In 1953, Carter proposed a sweeping deportation of Mexicans, Operation Cloud Burst, that would have required military assistance, and President Eisenhower refused to order that assistance. However, in 1954, after Eisenhower appointed retired Lt. Gen. Joseph Swing (his friend and classmate) to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Swing and Carter co-conceived, prepared, announced, and directed Operation Wetback.

Carter grew up in the Texas border town of Laredo where many men, including his father, were Border Patrol officers. At age 17, Carter shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican whom Carter’s mother thought was involved in stealing their car. Carter was convicted of murder and served three years before his conviction was overturned on a technicality. Soon after, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Border Patrol, moving swiftly up its ranks.

A number of years after retiring from the Border Patrol, Carter joined with Neal Knox, a fiery gun-rights journalist, to plan and lead a successful takeover of the NRA. They saw the NRA as soft, for allowing the limited gun controls that were adopted in the Gun Control Act of 1968, and for failing to campaign against Senator Joseph Tydings, a gun control advocate. The 1977 coup, known as “the Revolt at Cincinnati,” led to Carter becoming the new NRA director, and Knox becoming chair of the NRA’s newly invigorated Institute for Legislative Action.

Soon the NRA was involved in massive lobbying, campaign funding, and litigation. It adopted a “no compromise” approach to gun control. It shifted its message to one that “embraced the idea that the Second Amendment, not just the interest of hunters or even of homeowners, was at the heart of its concerns” (Michael Waldman, “The Second Amendment”).

It promoted the Second Amendment as sacred, the Primary Right that protects all other rights, and it urged members to see themselves not only as self-defenders but as patriots defending America. Guns were to be understood as core (existential) ingredients of an owner’s personal identity (“I carry. That’s who I am,” said one enthusiast). The coffers of the NRA swelled in part from million-dollar gifts from gun manufacturers, foreign and domestic. In turn, the NRA has been a huge promoter of gun sales including AR-15-style rifles, one of which was its Gun of the Year in 2017.

The radicalized and uncompromising NRA immediately became a core group in a new GOP. In 1976, when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination for president, he had wooed the NRA and pro-gun constituency with a strong pro-gun article in Guns and Ammo Magazine. In it, he not only advocated for guns for hunting and self-defense, but also for insurrection: “(Guns) insure that the people are the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed. When the British forgot that, they got a revolution.”

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In 1980, the NRA endorsed Reagan for president — the first time it had endorsed a candidate — and the GOP adopted its strongest-ever Second Amendment platform plank. Then, in 1983 Reagan further solidified the partnership by becoming the first president to address the NRA’s annual meeting. Donald Trump would become the second president to do so, addressing it in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and since leaving office.

Over the past 40 years, the NRA has expanded its ideological extremism and political activism, and until recently, its affluence and membership. It and other Second Amendment absolutists have also shown strong tendencies commonly associated with extremism and fundamentalism; for example, being uncompromising; holding a worldview that pits a glorious (patriotic, American) U.S. versus a vilified (disloyal, traitorous) THEM; fear-mongering; and considering dissent to be a personal attack on their existential identities. These and other of its fundamentalist tendencies undermine such foundations of democracy as a national sense of unity, a commitment to power-sharing, and a commitment to deliberate, pragmatic decision-making.

It is important to note, though well beyond this My Turn to describe, that other key groups in the GOP’s base exhibit many of these same, extremist tendencies that jeopardize democracy.