At first glance there does not seem to be much in common between Acorn–the deeply corrupt ‘community’ organization engaged in a variety of electoral and financial fraud while disguised as a selfless band of anti-poverty warriors–and William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, stiff necked High Churchman and counselor of Charles I.
But Acorn, or it least its lawyers, thinks they have a lot in common, and it is going to court to prove it.
Archbishop Laud was beheaded following the passage through Parliament of a Bill of Attainder, which was a very convenient parliamentary procedure that allowed one to have unwanted persons executed without all the fuss and bother of a trial. Henry VIII found it particularly useful when dispensing with unwanted relatives and extra wives.
The Founding Fathers felt, correctly, that this procedure (still used in Britain at the time of our Revolution) was one of the worst features of the British system. The Constitution specifically bans these bills. In this country, you have to be tried before you can be hanged.
Acorn thinks it was the victim of a legislative lynching last month when after a video showing Acorn employees helping disguised journalists to establish brothels and evade taxes, Congress whooped through a law to prevent any more federal money going down this particular rat hole.
It may well be that, legally speaking, Acorn has a point. And bills of attainder are so bad that nobody, not even child-prostitution enablers pretending to be noble defenders of the poor, should be the victim of one.
But people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Despite resistance from its powerful political friends and patrons (Acorn is closely linked to the powerful SEIU union whose leader has been the most frequent visitor to the White House), investigations are breaking out all over.
I’m chiefly struck by the way so few journalists and commentators make any effort to put this scandal in historical perspective. Traditionally, the Democratic Party’s northern base rested on urban political machines. These machines enriched their leaders, but they did more than that. They functioned, in an age before ‘community organizers’ and Saul Alinsky, as empowerment and development institutions for immigrants struggling to gain a foothold in American society.
Back before the progressive movement, civil service exams and the concept of lifetime employment in government jobs, the urban machines provided a route into the middle class for new immigrant groups. The police, the firefighters, City Hall bureaucrats and the public schools were stuffed with loyal members of ethnic groups aligned with the machines. City Hall contracts went to law firms, contractors and other groups who knew how to build strong relationships with the machine bosses.
It’s useful, I think, to see Acorn as a latter day practitioner of a very old style of politics – and indeed to look at much that goes on in American cities today as the latest incarnation of the urban politics of the nineteenth century. Ballot box stuffing, intimidation of enemies, a disregard for legal niceties in the administration of patronage, the fierce defense of incompetent teachers and civil servants: all this we have seen before and, historically, the most accomplished masters of this kind of politics were Irish, not African-American.
Ultimately the great white urban machines either evolved (as in Chicago) or gradually weakened as their constituents moved to the suburbs or otherwise overcame the discrimination and other handicaps that formerly blocked their upward mobility. As that happened, they had fewer loyal defenders against charges of corruption on the one hand,more citizens demanding higher quality municipal governance on the other. A lot of people got caught in the transition between the old politics and the new – and ended up in jail.
My guess is that something similar is happening today. Despite continuing problems, African Americans are coming to enjoy more opportunities for upward mobility. Like white ethnic groups before them, they are moving to the suburbs, and those remaining in the cities are increasingly focused on good governance (better public schools and protection from crime, for example). Meanwhile, like other ethnic groups, they face competition from new waves of immigrants in the trenches of urban politics. Today it increasingly makes sense for African Americans to want more to protect their kids from bad teachers than to protect bad teachers in lifetime jobs. They are less concerned with jobs in the dairy, more concerned with the quality and quantity of milk coming out of the cows. That will only increase as Hispanic voters increase their power in the urban politics of the future.
Acorn’s troubles come at a time when a significant number of African-American members of Congress are under scrutiny for various ethical and legal reasons, and when William “Icebox” Jefferson has been sentenced to thirteen years in prison on bribery charges. But they also come at a time when a new generation of African-American leaders is practicing a new kind of politics, most notably Cory Booker in Newark and, of course, the current President of the United States. The future of African-American politics lies with the cleaner and blander politics they represent, rather than the colorful urban demagoguery of the likable scoundrels of old.
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