Pearl River      As the years pass by, one after another, in this work we sometimes come to a fuller understanding of the meaning of the word “bittersweet.”  It’s a funny word.  How can something be both bitter and sweet?

I thought of this a couple of years ago reading a long piece in the Arkansas Times that boiled down simply to the fact that ACORN was right almost fifty years ago in opposing the construction of the Wilbur Mills Expressway, now called I-630, when we predicted it would bisect Little Rock racially and economically, which, sadly, it did.

I thought of this again, reading a piece forwarded to me by a colleague in Philadelphia, intriguingly called “ACORN is the Future of the Democratic Party” by Carl Beijer, who writes for something called “The Peoples’ Line.”  I wasn’t familiar with Carl or the Line, but how could I not want to read this piece?  How could ACORN then, or now, have been the future of the Democratic Party?  What’s Brother Beijer thinking about here?

It didn’t take much reading to grasp his point.  He was zinging the cowardice of the Democratic Party and its elected leaders, from President Obama on down to many in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  When rightwing provocateurs and conservative Republican operatives trumped-up allegations against ACORN, subsequently discredited as mostly fabricated, rather than standing up for ACORN, or even simply staying true to the course, many of whom knew the organization well, they turned chicken, bucked and ran, and, worse, jumped on the conservatives’ bandwagon to heap scorn on the organization, stampeding ACORN donors and allies, and accelerating the attack.  Despite being nonpartisan, a simple nonprofit rather than a tax-exempt organization, and not directly receiving government funds, they attacked housing and service projects and components within ACORN’s family of organizations, and “defunded ACORN,” despite not having any grants to ACORN that could be stopped.

Beijer’s point is simple.  Even with control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats folded like a cheap suit when ACORN was attacked.  Trump is now maliciously and aggressively going after party donors, think tanks, and allies, smelling the party’s weakness, and its inability to learn the lesson to stand and fight from the ACORN debacle of 2009.

Sure, Beijer gets some things wrong, but he’s right that ACORN’s success in registering new voters in the 2008 cycle that saw Obama elected and Congressional control was a key trigger in provoking the attack against ACORN, even though few top Democrats would have seen ACORN as a buddy then, even if we were allied on getting more low-and-moderate income families to the polls.  He’s also right that part of the reason for the Democrats retreat was their root antipathy around class, the low-and-moderate income families that were ACORN members, and, though he doesn’t mention race, inarguably that was also part of their desertion of the organization, whose membership majority was urban and minority. Interestingly, he thinks forcing the Democrats to go back to their roots, rebuild their base, remember the historic importance of their working-class base, and reinvent themselves without their rich donors and tech buddies, will help them in the long run, if they survive.

None of that changes how bittersweet it is to read some recognition of how right we were and how wronged we were more than fifteen years ago.  It’s sweet to have been on the right side of history, but bitter still to live with the tragic consequences for many and millions from the mistakes made then.  Worse, as important as what should have been learned in the ACORN affair then, it’s also bittersweet to think about whether as many who should have learned lessons from ACORN’s setback then, actually did learn anything at all.