Wall Street the Answer to Democratic Jitters? Come On.

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The Democratic Party has long been the party representing, however unevenly, the broadest, and most conflicting, collection of class interests in the world, but this is getting ridiculous.

In the past week, one of the world’s richest billionaires (not just a garden-variety billionaire, but Michael Bloomberg) and a billionaire-enabler (Deval Patrick of Bain Capital) have let the word go forth that they intend to enter the Democratic presidential field, which had shrunk down to a mere 16 or 17 candidates. They would join billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running in part on an anti-billionaire platform, though not so explicitly as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The ailment to which Bloomberg and Patrick apparently see themselves as the cure is the epidemic of Democratic jitters—the growing fear among Democrats that none of the existing 17 (or maybe it’s 18 now) candidates have wide enough appeal to defeat Donald Trump next year. You know the refrains: Warren is too schoolmarmish to win the blue-collar men of the Midwestern swing states; Bernie can’t win the recently Republican suburban professionals who voted Democratic in 2018; Biden will depress youth turnout to trace levels; Buttigieg won’t get the votes of African American and Latino social conservatives, and so on and so on. None of these fears can be disproved; they all look to have some elements of truth to them.

But the idea that protagonists of actually existing capitalism—which, among Democrats, has come under withering (and overdue) critique, so much so that by a ten-percentage-point margin, Democrats favor socialism over capitalism—can allay these fears by being more electable is sheer ego-driven fantasy. Not just those disenthralled Democrats, but the electorate as a whole is not about to flock to the personifications of Wall Street. If there’s one Democrat out there who could do well in all those constituencies that the Democrats need to dump Trump next year, and who’s not already in the field, it’s not Mike or Deval. It’s Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, whose name is increasingly coming up when Democrats discuss their jitters—the one progressive with a proven record of winning those swing white working-class voters who’ve drifted to Trump, not to mention voters of color, suburban professionals, and the young. In itself, this doesn’t mean he’d be the strongest Democratic candidate, but he certainly checks off the boxes that are making Democrats nervous these days.

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