Rising From ACORN's Fall

News reports today that California Attorney General Jerry Brown did not find cause to prosecute workers for the community group ACORN who were caught in a sting orchestrated by a conservative blogger are bittersweet, given that Thursday was the day that ACORN officially closed its doors.

That closing is perhaps the most stunning collapse of a progressive organization in recent history. It was brought on by a sustained right-wing assault and abetted at the end by the abandonment of the organization by many of the people who should have been ACORN's most ardent defenders—not in defense of the inappropriate behavior of a few ACORN staff members and volunteers but in defense of the causes that ACORN championed and the legacy that ACORN built, which should not have been allowed to have been set back by a couple of bad-acting pseudo-journalists with a video camera.

The one person who had a front-row seat to the work ACORN was doing and the right-wing barrage that led to ACORN's fall was John Atlas, the president of the National Housing Institute and editor of Shelterforce magazine. After following the organization since 2004 for a book that is scheduled for release in June, "Seeds of Change: The Untold Story of ACORN," Atlas says in this interview that one of the tragedies of the ACORN saga was the inability of the progressive movement to mobilize effectively to protect ACORN and its programs.

"By and large, the progressive movement ... [was] insufficient to come to the defense of ACORN," Atlas says. Part of the reason, he says, is that much of the left is not engaged consistently with the plight of the working poor. "The progressive movement tilts almost to an upper-class voice," Atlas says.

Long before the financial crisis sparked a debate in the progressive blogosphere about such issues as affordable housing, predatory lending and redlining, living wage battles and other bread-and-butter issues, ACORN and its affiliates were fighting on these fronts, often scoring significant victories.

In the wake of ACORN's demise, Atlas says, there is good news in the fact that there are several smaller organizations, many by former ACORN officials, that are forming to take up the work that ACORN did. And the right is pouncing on these organizations with a propaganda drumbeat through its echo chamber, hoping to kill them off as well. How will progressives respond this time? Atlas' chronicling of ACORN's fall challenges us to decide whether we will fight for the people ACORN fought for or will we let the right claim another victory at their expense.

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