Last Friday a crane collapsed in lower Manhattan, killing a man named David Wichs. The next day the papers told the story of his life: a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia; a math whiz with a degree from Harvard; a thoughtful neighbor and husband; “the nicest, most trustworthy person that I have known,” according to his boss, Mark Gorton, of Tower Research Capital. Mr. Wichs was just 38 when he died.

I never met Mr. Wichs, but reading about him reminded me of so many people I know in his industry—prodigiously bright and slyly funny, reasonably wealthy but rarely ostentatious, family men of the type who show up at school auctions and United Jewish Appeal dinners. Maybe they voted for Barack Obama the first time, probably not the second. They’re the people who, even now, make American finance the envy of the world.

They’re the most demonized people in America.

That’s the import of Bernie Sanders’s remark, in his debate last week with Hillary Clinton, that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” The senator from Vermont went on to say that “corruption is rampant” in the financial sector, his evidence being that “major bank after major bank has reached multibillion settlements” with the feds.

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Sanders has accused Wall Street of fraud, and it surely won’t be the last. No political or social penalties attach, in today’s America, to the wholesale indictment of this entire industry and the people who work in it. Had another presidential candidate made a similarly damning remark about some other profession—public-school teachers, say, or oil-rig workers—there would have been the usual outcry about false stereotypes, the decline of civility and so on. When Bernie says it about Wall Street there’s a collective shrug, if not nodding agreement.