On Monday, news broke that the embattled community-organizing group ACORN had "dissolved as a national structure," with individual chapters severing their relationship to one another. It turned out not to be true -- ACORN still exists as a national organization, but several of its large state chapters, including the ones in New York, Massachusetts, and California, have become independent organizations.
"It's no secret that we've been weakened by a whole series of right-wing attacks that have made it hard for us to do work and get funding," National ACORN spokesperson Kevin Whelan told the Prospect on Monday. "So organizers and leaders are having to figure out how to carry out fighting foreclosures [and] organizing their communities." Whelan added that while the new organization will be staffed with former ACORN people, "there is no formal or structural relationship ? between ACORN and these new organizations that have been announced."
You'd think that conservatives would see ACORN's restructuring in the wake of financial difficulties as a victory, but the immediate response looked more like grief-stricken denial. Over at Andrew Breitbart's Web site Big Government, where last September conservative activist James O'Keefe published a series of heavily edited videos that appear to show ACORN workers giving advice on how to evade taxes while running a prostitution ring, the news was greeted with disbelief. "ACORN is attempting to perpetrate yet another spectacular fraud on the American people in order to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into its coffers," wrote one conservative writer on Breitbart's Web site. "Congressional funding of ACORN's election fraud and racketeering business is no longer guaranteed, so ACORN is trying to pass off various state chapters as 'new' groups."
The statement encompassed everything the right feels about ACORN -- from the conspiracy-laden speculation to the creeping panic that ACORN might not exist to kick around anymore. ACORN hysteria is a bitter cocktail of white anxiety, economic populism, and the inability to cope with the right's own electoral defeats. Since 2008, ACORN has stood for everything bad about America.
The mortgage crisis? Republicans blamed it on ACORN's advocacy for fair housing practices on behalf of minorities. John McCain's 2008 loss? ACORN's registration of low-income minority voters was just a front for a massive voter-fraud operation that stole the election. Even the "pimp" videos that damaged ACORN so thoroughly evoked an old-timey minstrel show predicated on a paranoid fantasy of how people of color actually live. ACORN-bashing became the GOP's favored foil for stoking white racial fears and resentment behind a thin veil of deniability. The most disturbing thing about the ACORN scandal isn't that the right effectively smeared a liberal group -- it's that so many people not on the right went along with it, proving the ongoing effectiveness of race as a weapon in American politics.
Conservative criticisms of ACORN have usually avoided the organization's actual problems, such as issues of governance and professionalism as well as an incident several years ago when the board concealed the fact that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN's founder, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization. Instead, Republicans have opted to finger ACORN as the millennial version of the Illuminati, accusing them of everything from "fixing elections" to causing the foreclosure crisis. The right is mourning ACORN's diminished profile because no other organization proved as successful at galvanizing right-wing fears about economic distress and an empowered minority electorate.
When O'Keefe's videos were made public, the backlash against ACORN was swift. The mainstream press acted as though the videos, despite being heavily manipulated, confirmed all the outlandish accusations that conservatives had been making against ACORN all along. The Census Bureau, which ACORN had volunteered to help gather data for the 2010 Census, ended its relationship with the group. A majority Democratic Congress, rushing to punish an organization that looks out for the interests of voters who tend to cast their ballots for Democrats, voted to defund the organization. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, apologized for not paying more attention to the right's conspiracy theories regarding ACORN.
Months later, the actual evidence against ACORN began collapsing. ACORN commissioned an internal review conducted by Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. A Congressional Research Service report showed that ACORN had never misused government funds and that there was no evidence it had engaged in voter fraud -- despite the widespread Republican belief that ACORN "stole" the 2008 election for Obama. A federal judge ruled that Congress' defunding of ACORN amounted to an unconstitutional "bill of attainder" since ACORN hadn't actually been convicted of any wrongdoing. The notion that ACORN (which has been protesting unscrupulous lending practices for years) contributed to the foreclosure crisis rested on the idea that laws outlawing racial discrimination in housing caused the crisis to begin with -- arguments that never held much water.
The conservative activist who had filmed the original videos was caught allegedly trying to break into the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to pull another stunt. Slowly media organizations came to acknowledge that O'Keefe wasn't exactly the most trustworthy source -- but they've still been slow to acknowledge their mistakes -- such as having suggested O'Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles had entered the ACORN offices dressed as a pimp and prostitute. (They didn't.)
The case against ACORN fell apart, but that didn't change ACORN's fate. Whelan suggested that the organization will remain a national one but that it's likely more state chapters will break off because of difficulties paying their bills. For now, progressive organizations serving minority and working-class communities have learned that Democrats in Congress won't take their own side in a fight.
As for conservative activists, they'll have to find a new bogeyman to blame for all their problems -- or rather a new target to finger in their perennial conspiracy theories.
