LATE last week Naomi Wolf argued in the Guardian that the crackdowns on Occupy encampments across the country are part of a conspiracy to crush the movement, a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top! "This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers", Ms Wolf argues. "As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against [the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS)] at the highest national levels." As Ms Wolf's piece made the rounds on social-networking sites, it was clear that many on the left really believed she was hot on the trail of something big.

Ms Wolf says she was initially puzzled about the motivation for the concerted campaign against OWS, but then she asked around and "found out what it was that OWS actually wanted". Miraculously, she found out what OWS actually wants. Finally! Here it is, closely paraphrased:

1. Get the money out of politics (blunt the effects of the Citizens United decision).

2. Reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation (restore Glass-Steagall).

3. Close loopholes that allow members of Congress to vote on legislation affecting corporations in which they are investors.

Ms Wolf's first problem is that OWS has been pretty disciplined, and pretty smart, in refusing to enumerate demands this clearly. The strategic danger of putting proposals like these on the table is that it invites debate, and these are debates OWS and its sympathisers might not win. Campaign-finance is a tricky issue. The Supreme Court struck down limits on corporate spending on political speech not because a handful of eminent jurists are in the pockets of the oligarchs, but because the plausible jurisprudential argument that such limits are inconsistent with the first amendment convinced a majority of the court. A constitutional amendment has been proposed to restore the legislative discretion to regulate political spending/speech taken away by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the first amendment, but this won't go anywhere, because maybe half the 99% are for it. Financial regulation is tricky, too. I agree with Matthew Yglesias (among many others) that the role of Glass-Steagall in the recession and financial-sector meltdown is overblown, and likely a distraction from the sorts of issues on which OWS ought to be focused. And how about congressional market manipulation and insider trading? Megan McArdle recently examined the evidence:

[T]he academic evidence on congressional insider trading is mixed: an older study found a huge effect (Senators outperform the market by 12%, while house members outperform by a still impressive 6%); but a newer study, as yet unpublished, showed that as a group, congressmen slightly under-perform index funds.

As far as we know, and Ms McArdle emphasises that it isn't very far, members of Congress generally do worse than the market.

If OWS didlay out explicit demands like those Ms Wolf mentions, the movement's populist energy would quickly dissipate as it began to become mired in argument with smart, reasonable people with different opinions. If the inchoate anger of young people harmed by the recession is reduced to highly-debatable bullet points, OWS will die on its own, no conspiracy needed. That is, I take it, among the main reasons OWS refuses to say what it really wants.

Anyway, Ms Wolf believes that OWS's notional demands pose such a threat to "personal congressional profits streams" that officials at the "highest national levels" have colluded with local authorities to put an end to the camping which, if left unchecked, might fail to amend the constitution, or implement some not very meaningful financial regulation, or stop members of congress from making dubiously productive trades.

Despite the facially ridiculous character of Ms Wolf's conspiracy theorising, Joshua Holland of Alternet digs in and find no factual basis for the claim that the various police actions (and outrageous overreactions) against local Occupy protesters across the country have been coordinated from Washington. Following up on Mr Holland's debunking, Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, makes the excellent point that the decentralised application of coercive authority has a storied history:

From the battles over abolition to the labor wars at the turn of the last century to the Red Squads of the twentieth-century police departments to the struggles over Jim Crow, state repression in America has often been decentralized, displaying that very same can-do spirit of local initiative that has been celebrated by everyone from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam. Though Tocqueville and Putnam were talking of course about things like creating churches and buildings roads, the fact is: if the locals can build a church or a road on their own, they can also get rid of dissenters on their own, too, no?

Sometimes little platoons wear jackboots. Mr Robin goes on to say:

It's not surprising that faced with the crackdown of OWS protests, Wolf would immediately turn to a theory of national, centralized repression. It's part of our national DNA, on the left and the right, to assume that tyranny works that way.

I actually find it more than a littlesurprising that folks on the left would so easily forget that tyranny is often local. The liberal antipathy to the sort of decentralisation of power confusingly known as federalism runs very deep, and is rooted in the very things Mr Robin mentions, such as the struggle to abolish Jim Crow. I would argue that Ms Wolf's it-goes-all-the-way-to-the-top conspiracy theorising seemed so plausible to so many OWS sympathisers because the Occupy movement is itself fueled by a conspiracy theory: that the richest 1% have conspired to capture the political system and use it to bend the economic system to their exclusive advantage. So it's not surprising that Ms Wolf's conspiracy theory, which fits so neatly with OWS's larger conspiratorial narrative, would find such a receptive, credulous audience.

(Photo credit: AFP)