The Charisma of Collapse

When a city gives up on fixing itself, it starts electing people who make its decline feel meaningful.

I told you yesterday I am going to change my tone. This is me changing my tone.

I still love the guy. Zohran Mamdani. I think he is a breath of fresh air. And there’s something seductive about watching a status quo political machine fall apart.

When Andrew Cuomo conceded the mayoral primary to Zohran Mamdani, it felt like the end of an era. The last gasp of transactional politics in a city that no longer believed in it.

A disgraced titan stepped aside. A righteous newcomer rose in his place.

For many, it looks like hope. Renewal. A moral correction. The kind of story New York has always told about itself — messy, dramatic, redemptive.

But if you squint, it’s something else entirely. A different kind of ending.

Mamdani isn’t ascending to lead a healthy city that needs vision. He’s stepping into a vacuum.

The institutional arteries of New York are clogged. The budget is bloated and brittle. The tax base is shrinking as wealth quietly relocates to Florida or Texas. Schools are ideological battlegrounds. The subway is a lottery of delays, dysfunction, and danger. Agencies are hollowed out, some captured by activists, others paralyzed by fear. And the people who once built, staffed, or defended the city’s infrastructure have either been priced out, pushed out, or tuned out.

In that context, Mamdani’s victory isn’t a pivot point. It’s a confession—a sign that the city no longer expects to be fixed—it just wants someone who can moralize the decline, someone who can give dignity to the dysfunction, someone who can make collapse feel principled.

This is not about Mamdani’s integrity.

He’s not a fraud or a grifter. He truly believes what he says. That’s what makes it worse. His platform combines economic redistribution, disciplined skepticism, tenant-first housing policies, and aggressive public sector growth, and it’s sincere.

But sincerity is not governance. And conviction, untethered from tradeoffs, becomes ideology. You don't get justice when you place ideology inside a broken machine. You get paralysis.

After years of corruption, coverups, and consultant jargon, the idea of someone who “means it” feels revolutionary. And for younger voters, especially those raised in the wreckage of post-9/11 America, meaning is more valuable than maintenance.

They’ve inherited a city that’s been looted twice — first by finance, then by real estate. Their anger is real. Their sense of betrayal is justified. But their answers are dangerously thin.

They see broken transit and blame capitalism. They see rising rents and blame landlords. They see crime and blame structural inequality. They want immediate justice with no regard for cost, no patience for process, and no trust in the institutions that still barely hold the city together.

In that moral framework, Mamdani makes perfect sense. He doesn’t hedge. He doesn’t speak like someone who’s ever had to manage risk. His certainty is his currency. And in a city that’s lost faith in outcomes, certainty is the new competence.

But cities are not college campuses. They don’t run on manifestos. They run on plumbing. On payroll systems. On snow removal, union contracts, budget reconciliations, and a thousand other unsexy functions that keep a city from tipping into chaos. These systems aren’t ideological. They are fragile. And when they break, they don’t break symbolically — they break for real.

You can’t redistribute a subway. You can’t organize away a fire department deficit. You can’t use moral clarity to patch a pension shortfall.

The myth that you can is what Mamdani’s campaign is built on. The belief that good intentions and enough political will can reverse the tide. That if we just listen to activists, defund the right things, and tax the right people, the city will heal.

But the people who say that have never governed. And in New York, the consequences of their governance won’t be felt evenly. The wealthy have escape routes. The very poor have subsidized safety nets. It’s the working class — the ones who can’t leave, can’t dodge the tax hikes, and can’t afford private replacements for public failure — who will pay the price.

In that way, Mamdani’s rise isn’t a revolution. It’s the final act in a long moral abdication. For decades, the city’s elite — its financiers, media darlings, and polite liberal class — have watched the system decay and said nothing. They tolerated ideological capture in schools because they didn’t want to argue at dinner parties. They let their children be radicalized by absurd ideas because they assumed it was harmless. They paid more taxes, got fewer services, and accepted the tradeoff as part of living in New York — the greatest city in the world, after all.

Now that world is gone. Their kids have grown up to hate the very civilization that subsidized their brunches and rent-controlled apartments. And rather than push back, the parents still just want to fit in. They whisper complaints about crime and homelessness and broken schools, but never publicly. They tell themselves it’s just a phase. That it’ll pass. That they’ll always have their weekend house upstate.

Meanwhile, the city decays. Not suddenly, not dramatically — but steadily. A slow erosion of shared norms, basic competence, and civic trust. Until one day, the only thing left to do is pick a side in a symbolic fight. Cuomo or Mamdani. The corrupt technocrat or the charismatic ideologue. The system that failed, or the movement that promises to avenge it.

Mamdani might win in November. Because he’s not just a candidate. He’s a story. A projection of a city’s desire to believe again — not in results, but in virtue. Not in growth, but in justice. Even if that justice is abstract, and the cost is material.

He will try to govern. He will learn that the machine does not respond to moral commands. He will try to spend money that doesn’t exist, reform agencies that don’t function, and placate movements that grow more radical the more they are fed. And he will fail — not because he is insincere, but because sincerity is not enough.

And when he fails, his defenders will say the system was rigged against him. That New York was already too broken. That Mamdani, like so many before him, was just one man. But the city won’t care. It will continue to decline. Only now, that decline will feel righteous.

There is something tragic about watching a city replace pragmatism with purity. About watching institutions wither, only to be repopulated by activists with no institutional memory. But there is also something predictable about it. This is what happens when governance is reduced to symbolism. When cities forget how they function. When belief becomes a substitute for discipline.

Let Mamdani win. Let the fantasy play out. It may be the only way for the city to remember what it once took for granted — not just competence, but adulthood. It won’t be the revolution his supporters imagine. It will be a reckoning. Not of capitalism or police or developers. But of a culture that stopped knowing how to protect the things it claimed to love.

New York will never be a socialist city. But it stopped being a serious one long time ago.