Today In Bad “Federalist” Arguments

Following up on last year’s discussion of Naomi Wolf’s credulous, implicitly anti-federal power conspiracy theorizing, Corey Robin notes that there remains no evidence that the Occupy crackdown was initiated by the federal government as opposed to our benevolent local overlords.

Meanwhile, this thread contains an absolutely classic example of touting the proactive strategic dynamism that allegedly come from decentralized power. Is there any evidence that the American voting system — which, after all, managed to screw up a presidential election less than 15 years ago due to staggeringly inept and/or malicious policymaking and enforcement by state and local officials — is better than the many liberal democracies that have uniform national rules? Nope. Is there even any citation of any concrete benefits that are supposed to derive in theory from decentralized voting systems, let alone an attempt to balance them against the inevitable inequities that arise from decentralization? Of course not. Local variance is just good!