It would be hard to suggest it’s a surprise for the Democrats to announce, as they did today, that they’ll hold their nominating convention at Chicago. It has hosted 11 Democratic party conventions (and 14 Republican ones) between 1832 and today. Then, again, too, Chicago itself is rapidly becoming the premier showcase of failed Democratic policies. It has just doubled down on that record, electing leftist Brandon Johnson. Looks like an omen.

Chicago is associated with at least two Democratic disasters. At the 1896 convention, William Jennings Bryan was nominated on the “Cross of Gold” speech. At the end, he held out his arms and hung his head like he’d been crucified. The Democrats erupted in a thunderous ovation that, the Sun reported at the time, echoed with catcalls like “Down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street! Down with the Christ-killing gold bugs.”

Bryan ran a campaign for inflation, via the free coinage of silver, and went down to defeat to William McKinley. He stood for the gold standard and rarely left his front porch. Before McKinley finished his first term he signed the Gold Standard Act of 1900, ending the century-long debate over whether our currency would be based primarily on gold or silver. It’s a period with which to get acquainted in this season of debasement of our currency.

A second disaster was the convention in 1968. It nominated Vice President Humphrey, who’d been during the Battle of Vietnam a loyal veep to President Lyndon Johnson. Yet while forcing through the vote, with the aid of Mayor Richard J. Daley, anti-war protesters engulfed the city in a riot that made January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. The way the Democrats put down the riots was no doubt one, if only one, of the reasons the country elected Nixon.

Despite all this our guess is that President Biden picked Chicago because he wants to swaddle himself in the robes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mr. Biden settled into the Oval Office, after all, by cashiering the portrait of George Washington from its pride of place over the fireplace and replacing it with one of FDR, who was first nominated at Chicago in a speech in which he vowed to break “absurd traditions” and promised the New Deal.

Good luck, we say. The Sun, for one, welcomes a national debate in respect of FDR, who broke the Gold Standard Act of 1900, and, via the New Deal, introduced an economy dominated by the state. We understand that there are those, like our learned columnist Conrad Black, author of a magisterial biography of the 32nd (“Champion of Freedom”), who reckon FDR saved capitalism. We welcome that debate, too.

The next convention at Chicago could well prove as historic as any of these earlier assemblies. We can understand why Mr. Biden would rather invoke the memory of FDR, though, who forged an enduring Democratic electoral coalition, as opposed to the examples of Bryan or Humphrey, whose defeats reflected the party’s tendencies toward, respectively, inflationary economics and cultural disintegration.

The 2024 convention will come at a time of geopolitical tension not seen since the Cold War, as Mr. Biden’s administration blunders from one foreign-policy misstep to the next while America contends with an ascendant Communist China. It will offer an opportunity for Democrats — and Americans — to weigh their appetite for another term of Mr. Biden’s high-tax, high-inflation, high-regulation, and high-spending model of governance.

Which brings us back to Chicago’s mayor-elect, Mr. Johnson. We wish him well, but the omens are not auspicious. His ties to the teachers union will likely preclude needed school reform. He vows to boost taxes on the “suburbs, airlines & ultra-rich.” He defeated a law-and-order candidate and calls Defund the Police “an actual real political goal.” So if any disaffected Democrats riot in the summer of 2024, will there be anyone left to man the barricades?