This article by Will Bunch Philadelphia Inquirer is published in Star Tribune. Here is an excerpt:

Attorney General Merrick Garland might be the ultimate example of the American Dream-era baby boomer at the core of today’s Democratic Party — especially its elite leadership cadre. The grandchild of immigrants who came to America to flee antisemitism in Russia, Garland grew up in the booming 1960s middle-class suburbs of Chicago, won a scholarship to Harvard and entered the law in the hazy aftermath of the Watergate scandal, when Richard Nixon’s resignation fooled many into believing that “the system worked.”

Increasingly after 1979 — the year Garland began his first, brief stint in the U.S. Justice Department — the American system didn’t work. Deindustrialization and rising inequality devastated working-class communities like those that ring Chicago, while college opportunities like the break that Garland received grew more elusive. The possibly fatal irony for the Democratic Party is that the narrow sliver for whom the system did work — blinding them to the need for radical change and fighting the powers that be — became its leaders.

As the 86th attorney general of the United States, Garland offers much to admire. He moved his confirmation hearing to tears as he spoke of his relatives who stayed in Europe and died in the Holocaust. He’s a tireless worker with a dedication to public service, evidenced both by leaving a lucrative job in private practice to become a line prosecutor and his work tutoring underprivileged kids in the District of Columbia. Garland is decent, moral and incorruptible at the moment America desperately needs the one thing he seems not: a brawler for democracy.

Read the full article here.