Sol Stern, writing in City Journal (the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Institute) takes on ACORN, a lobbying and legal aid organization that has implemented a very successful lobbying strategy for tenants’ rights, “living wages”, unionization of welfare recipients, and a host of other policy planks. The article is interesting for its discussion of the strategy they have used, which involves working on a city-by-city level.
Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.
