Eric Grossman doesn’t look like he would want to do anything drastic. The top lawyer at Morgan Stanley is a 51-year-old homeowner in the New York suburbs with twin sons and a seat on the firm’s management committee. He’s another man in a power suit in a midtown Manhattan bank.
He also wants to topple America’s two-party system.
Grossman is trying to build a new party—called the Serve America Movement, or SAM—even though third wheels in American politics tend to have the lasting power of the Free Soilers and the Anti-Masons. His quixotic goal hasn’t deterred donors that include fellow members of Morgan Stanley’s operating committee, the bank’s head of government relations, its top independent board member, and the last chief executive officer, John Mack.
Don’t expect this crusade for unity to turn into the next Women’s March, Tea Party, or even a semi-memorable hashtag. At least so far, this is what resistance to President Donald Trump looks like on Wall Street. Even though tax cuts and reduced regulation have made big banks and corporations some of this era’s big winners, many of their executives squirm when the president abandons global agreements and threatens trade wars. These people also tend to resent and even dread the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, as if it’s out to get them personally. That opens a space for SAM’s unlikely, ambitious and well-moneyed cry for something else.
“Perhaps it’s a fear of arrogance that people are like, ‘Wow you can’t say that, you can’t say you’re going to be a party,’” said Richard Bennett, a partner at investment firm B-FORE Capital who contributed $140,000 to SAM. “I’m like, why not? What else are we going to do? That’s the only thing that’s going to fix it.”
SAM stands against divisiveness, but what it stands for isn't obvious. One Morgan Stanley executive who donated admitted he doesn’t know anything about it, he just wanted to help a friend’s pet cause.
SAM’s upbeat website, with no specifics on immigration, reproductive rights, or the health-care system, can’t clear up big questions. The principles are so broad and cheerful—“applying America’s innovative spirit,” “a strong, clear-eyed, values-based leader,” and “the vitality of local communities”—that they have the ring of taglines for a Silicon Valley startup that hasn’t put out a product yet.
This inoffensive flavor makes sense for a political project backed by executives from Morgan Stanley, a big bank with a particularly understated political style. At JPMorgan Chase & Co., by contrast, CEO Jamie Dimon devoted pages of this year’s annual letter to praising Trump’s tax cuts while warning against isolationism. And Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has perfected a pipeline to Washington, sending executives Gary Cohn and Dina Powell for stints in Trump’s White House.
“Let’s have civil dialogue.”
The financial types backing SAM have taken stock of the American landscape and decided the overarching crisis isn’t guns, opioids, climate change or the treatment of immigrants—it’s divisiveness. SAM thinks it has a shot at winning by preaching unity, and it is in vogue to make public pleas for politeness. Some elected officials have had more to say about White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave a Virginia restaurant than the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan.