1. Merrick Garland is bad, but he also reflects a deeper existential problem for Democrats. There is no artificial division between 'progressive politics' and elite corporate lawyers. They are the same thing. That was the point of the progressive movement.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1417159488537247745
2. Elite lawyers are the shock troops of the corporate and administrative state. They are anti-partisan and progressive. Why? Because law schools (and economics) were set up by progressives who wanted to destroy party politics and replace it with an administrative state.
3. Herbert Croly: "The overthrow of the two-party system is indispensable to the success of progressive democracy because, under American conditions, the vitality of the two-party system has been purchased... at the expensive of administrative independence and efficiency."
4. The original progressive movement were moral reformers who sought to create a national politics by evade what they saw as a reactionary Constitution and party politics by creating 'parastate' organizations: corporations, universities, foundations, nonprofits, magazines,etc.
5. Progressives sought to win elections, and then govern against the interests of their local political machines. They wanted to destroy partisanship and drive for public opinion consensus above party. It was explicitly culturally hegemonic, but also weak in political terms.
6. It was also an evangelical movement - half of the founding members of the American Economics Association were Protestant ministers - but opposed to fundamentalism, which they perceived of as, yes, reactionary and Southern.
7. Over the course of the 20th century, corporate lawyers, and law schools destroyed the traditional American jack-of-all trades country lawyer. Then in the 1980s, the corporate law firm was thoroughly corrupted by libertarianism. mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-… 
8. Today, both parties are dependent on those progressive institutions. Trump was obsessed with Ivy league credentials and the national media. So was Obama. The Federalist Society, with its tie to law schools and elitist corporatism, is an outgrowth of that progressive movement.
9. I guess I should say that progressives also disliked lawyers, and courts. They preferred economists, progressives and sociologists. It was in New Deal liberalism and right-wing Reaganism that their legal progeny articulated an elitist vision of rule from above.
10. Anyway, we're at a weird moment where our national 'parastate' institutions organized during the progressive era - national media, corporations, universities - seek to retain their hegemonic power but with less and less legitimacy.
11. On the right, elite dissidents are attacking the Federalist society. On the left, there is the thinner articulation that Garland isn't a 'wartime consigliere.' But the problem is deeper. Our legal establishment is tied to national institutions that have turned authoritarian.
12. As @samhaselby notes, the Ivy League, though many professors self-identify as 'left,' is pretty hostile to democracy. chronicle.com/article/how-me…
13. And at this point, elite corporate lawyers sell their services to national corporations by emphasizing how they are better at breaking the law than their competitors. mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-…
14. At this point, the end of apprentice law training and the corruption of law schools means we literally do not have the lawyers we need. We have a surplus of lawyers who know how to steal, but not ones who know how to govern.
https://twitter.com/DanielDancrane/status/1392126410253381633
15. One hope is that dissension among the elites - a basic recognition of the moral collapse of these national institutions - can revitalize them. It is sort of happening. But Merrick Garland is part of the problem. mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-antitrus…
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