New at Reason: Jesse Walker on ACORN

March 26, 2010

As ACORN closes its doors as a national organization, Managing Editor Jesse Walker looks past the organization's ideology and the charges of corruption that have swirled around it, arguing that its original sin was more primal: It was too centralized and professionalized to be a real community organization in the first place. Conservatives love to link ACORN to the late Saul Alinsky, Walker notes, but if ACORN had followed the Alinsky model more closely, it never would have ended up in a position where it would side with a wealthy developer over the neighborhood he's eliminating via eminent domain.

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