It took New York City barely a decade to move from Michael Bloomberg (mayor 2002-2014) to Zohran Mamdani — from a billionaire moderate who built a global business to an anti-capitalist socialist who’s never built anything.
Bloomberg personified competence, merit, and modernity. He was a technocrat with a work ethic forged in markets — the quintessential New Yorker who believed that numbers mattered, that data and pragmatism could solve problems, and that capitalism, however imperfect, was the engine that kept the city alive.
Mamdani is the inversion of that story. He’s the smiling avatar of grievance politics — a man who’s never signed a paycheck, raised capital, or met a payroll, yet rails against the very system that feeds the city’s workers. He doesn’t want to grow the pie; he wants to break the plate.
So what happened to New York? How did a city that once celebrated builders and innovators — from bankers to artists, from garment manufacturers to tech founders — turn to someone who blames success itself for society’s ills?
Did New Yorkers Change — or Did the World?
Some say it was Donald Trump — the Queens developer turned president — who poisoned the well. For many New Yorkers, capitalism’s swagger became indistinguishable from his brashness. “Moderate” began to sound like “complicit.” Every problem was blamed on “the system,” and every system was condemned as oppressive.
Others blame social media, the great amplifier of outrage. The algorithms rewarded passion over proof, hashtags over homework. The loudest became the leaders, and anger became authenticity. The more you despised the system, the more followers you gained.
Still others point to federal polarization — a country at war with itself. Washington became tribal, and so did New York. To be anti-Republican meant embracing anything that wasn’t Republican, even if it was radical.
The Fall of the Striver Ideal
Bloomberg embodied a uniquely American, and particularly Jewish, story — the son of immigrants who rose by grinding harder, thinking smarter, and building bigger. For generations, that was the city’s moral code: earn it.
Mamdani represents something new — or perhaps something lost. He is not the striver, but the symbol. The story isn’t one of building, but belonging. It’s politics as identity and resentment rather than responsibility and results.
When a city stops admiring those who build and starts rewarding those who only protest, decline is not far behind.
A Mirror, Not a Moment
New York’s journey from Bloomberg to Mamdani isn’t just a change in politics — it’s a cultural inversion. The Jewish billionaire who built an empire has been replaced by a Ugandan Muslim who campaigns against empires. The technocrat gave way to the ideologue. The achiever to the accuser.
The city once responded to horrible radical Islamic terrorism in downtown Manhattan by electing a proven builder to remake the city. Now the city has responded to that vile terrorism in southern Israel by rallying behind a novice who vilified the victims.
It’s tempting to say the city changed. But perhaps it merely revealed what it had become: a place where envy now outshouts excellence, and where tearing down is easier than building up.
New York once measured people by what they created. Now it measures them by what they condemn.
Frank Sinatra sang the city’s theme song “New York, New York,” that “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The city was a mark of excellence and competence. To win in New York City was the proving ground to anywhere and everywhere.
Does that now mean that grievance is the current marker of greatness in America? That radicalism and revolutionaries are the vanguard? Anti-capitalist socialism will come for cities around the United States?
The tragedy isn’t only that the city chose Mamdani. It’s that so many think it’s progress.
First One Through 