The fiery rhetoric and confrontational tactics of Gale Cincotta, co-founder of National People’s Action, helped lead to the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. (Courtesy National People’s Action)

Since the Fall 2008 elections, the right wing has attacked community organizers with gusto and abandon, gradually whittling away the legitimacy of the organizers who worked so hard to elect the current administration and Congress, and even at the legitimacy of the government itself. In the wake of doctored videos amplified by the right-wing press and uncritically distributed by the corporate press, Congress even voted to take funding away from ACORN—the community organizing network whose voter registration activities and willingness to absorb politically-motivated vote-suppression prosecutions around the country made it perhaps the single most important reason many Congressional representatives are in office. ACORN ultimately succumbed to the continuing and coordinated attacks.

But it is not just the death of ACORN that we must understand. It is much bigger than that.

ACORN was the most confrontational community organizing network, and some would even say the last confrontational community organizing network. What we have witnessed, perhaps, is the end of the fight.

Some might suggest that it is a sign of the power of organizing that ACORN, because of its potency, was the one that conservatives set their sights on. But it is also a sign of vulnerability. ACORN stood virtually isolated from the national community organizing networks while the attacks grew to a crescendo, culminating in the doctored O’Keefe/Fox News videos. The utter silence from the national community organizing networks (only the National Organizers Alliance publicly closed ranks with ACORN in the early days following the video attack) showed a national community organizing scene responding from its weakness rather than its strength.

Was ACORN left to die simply because it had been embroiled in an embezzlement scandal and made the subject of questionably edited videotapes? Or was it that ACORN was too confrontational—too ready for a fight? Would it still have been brought down without political enemies? ACORN increasingly seemed to be an anachronism in a new millennial shift away from confrontational, social change–oriented community organizing to a weaker form of development-oriented organizing going under the various banners of “relational organizing,” “consensus organizing,” and “asset-based community development.” None of them put confrontation at the front of their strategy and some of them avoid conflict altogether. Their proponents argue that we live in a post-conflict world, or that the haves and have-nots really have common interests, or that collaboration really can solve problems within the existing system. Their approach focuses on small-scale community development projects rather than large-scale social change—an approach increasingly favored by funders, decision makers, and academics.

Of course, confrontation and hardball politics is not seen as distasteful across the entire political spectrum. Organized right-wing disruptions against health insurance reform drew on the famous community organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration, even while they castigated him as a Communist. The right-wing organizations that grew from these efforts to harass politicians across the country laid shame to most progressive community organizers in their ability to mobilize anger and passion and get it on TV. Yes, health care legislation passed, but without even the “public option,” let alone a single-payer program. And conservatives have vowed what sounds like a fight to the death to repeal even the weak bill that was won. If they do succeed in mobilizing angry right-wing voters in the fall to elect a right-wing majority back to Congress and in leveraging a favorable decision against health care from the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, will it be because the fight has gone out of community organizing?