New Orleans Google Alerts are useful, but imperfect tools. I keep one for ACORN. Sometimes I get tricked when there’s a news item for London, Ontario, rather than London, England, and vice versa. It’s also still easy for me keep up with the winter preparation for squirrels based on the size of the acorn crop. More vexing for Google and for me is the fact that ACORN is an acronym, therefore capitalized, rather than Acorn with the capital “A” followed by the rest of the letters in lower caste. This used to be just a problem with the New York Times, but now their style book is confused, sometimes saying it one way, and sometimes correctly. The rightwing attack dogs very rarely get it wrong, since they still enjoy beating their drum in order to ascribe one issue after another to ACORN’s pernicious work and influence.
Indeed, the roots of ACORN, growing stronger globally and domestically every day, run deep, as I could see when I started reading a frontpage story in the Wall Street Journal today. I couldn’t miss the mention of Acorn in the fourth paragraph of their story entitled “The Rise of America’s Young Socialists.” They were talking about the political trajectory of a young man named Gabe Tobias, who was working as a community organizer for ACORN in 2006 after leaving college in Santa Anna, California, where my dad and his family lived throughout his youth. As the Journal reports,
Acorn, the nonprofit that employed him, began to see rashes of families, particularly Hispanic immigrants, complaining that they were being forced out of their homes. The culprit was adjustable-rate mortgages they had signed up for but scarcely understood. “It was devastating,” Tobias recalled. “They had everything locked up in their homes. They had nothing else.” In the ensuing months, he would become familiar with unscrupulous mortgage brokers’ tricks of the trade—using multiple sets of paperwork to mislead customers, enlisting community leaders to sell dubious products to those who spoke little English, and more. At an early age, he came to a sobering conclusion: “There’s an industry that’s set up to suck money out of working people.”
I remember those times and our campaign against these predatory subprime lenders well. I’ll never forget one day in Orange County when I had to bargain with three of the companies in one day, and then catch a plane out of John Wayne Airport for the next stop. I could say that scarred me, but it was just another day in the work, but one of the themes of the article was how much the 2007-8 housing meltdown, triggered by financial institution chicanery, had altered the way an entire generation sees the country and the world, moving many to embrace democratic socialism.
The rise of Zohran Mamdani, as a democratic socialist and likely soon mayor of New York City, also has roots in that crisis of capitalism for which banks have paid billions, but will never really apologize. The Working Families Party, co-founded by ACORN, also is name-checked as another source for this move leftward by many now in their 30’s and 40’s, as is the Sanders campaign and Occupy Wall Street.
The reporter plays all of this straight, but the placement on the frontpage of the conservative’s favorite national paper is a warning signal, that the MAGA youth of Charlie Kirk don’t explain where many others have gone. Identifying as socialists, even communists, has become normalized, and unlikely to produce the palpitations that were a mainstream political requirement for decades following the end of the Cold War. Doing a workshop on ACORN’s model of community organization in Philadelphia a in 2023 to a crowd of almost forty, when people went around the room introducing themselves, there was a smattering of ones from DSA and Philadelphia Socialists, as well as one or two who said they were communists. Later, one of my hosts said there were four or five different groups of socialists organized in the city. “Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones.”
People are searching for alternatives and a way forward that works. Trump’s regime is going to accelerate these movements as the usual institutions, agencies, and parties seem unable to protect the country and its democratic traditions from more blatant redistributions that privilege the rich accompanied by crony capitalism, which is encouraged at every turn. I have to admit some pride that ACORN’s roots were so deep that new progressive trees and branches are growing. We’ll try to do our share, but are hoping this generation can point the way to real progressive change that is stalled many places now.