In a healthy civic culture, disagreement is argued and adjudicated, not performed. Opponents are engaged rather than targeted, and public leaders model the kind of seriousness that makes cooperation possible even when trust is thin.
This model has all but collapsed on our nation’s college and university campuses, where demonization of opponents has become the norm. For years, Americans were told not to worry for the excesses of collegiate life were dismissed as temporary or exaggerated. But for those on the receiving end, the pattern was clear: Disagreement was not engaged but exposed, motives assigned, identities flattened, arguments replaced with accusation. Gaslighting and doxing was accepted as appropriate political action and the political goal of campus life was not persuasion but isolation, delivered with a kind of satisfaction that the target deserved it.
That culture is no longer confined to the campus.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent rhetoric offers a clear example. This week, the mayor filmed a video outside Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse to promote a new pied-à-terre tax on luxury properties. The message was straightforward: identify the individual, personalize the policy, turn it into a viral moment. It worked, at least on its own terms. But it revealed something deeper. This was not an argument about policy mechanics. It was politics as spectacle, built around a person rather than a problem. The decision to stand outside someone’s home and turn him into a symbol mattered.
And it felt familiar. Anyone who has spent time in certain academic spaces over the past decade will recognize the pattern: identify a target, collapse complexity, assign moral blame, and amplify. What is new is not the tactic. It is the setting.
Mamdani is not borrowing this style from a distance. He is fluent in it because he came of age in it. The moral certainty, the personalization of policy disputes, the performative confrontation staged for an audience primed to cheer—these are the native idioms of a generation formed inside institutions where such habits were rewarded and rarely challenged. What was once the campus vernacular has become the governing norm. The mayor of New York is not an exception to the pattern. He is its most visible graduate.
Notably figures like Griffin are not just participants in civic life. They help make it possible. Griffin founded Citadel in 1990 and, in 2002, Citadel Securities, now one of the world’s largest market makers, with more than 3,100 employees. Citadel has committed to a $1.2 billion Park Avenue tower as its new New York headquarters, at a moment when many firms were moving the other way. His philanthropy, organized under Griffin Catalyst, exceeds $2 billion in lifetime giving: a $400 million gift to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a new cancer pavilion in Manhattan; more than $500 million to Harvard; support for the Hospital for Special Surgery’s new Kellen Tower opening this year in Manhattan; $40 million to the Museum of Modern Art; and a $15 million gift to the National Constitution Center. He builds firms that employ thousands and endows the public goods—hospitals, museums, universities—that make cities like New York or Philadelphia possible.
None of this depends on where Griffin sleeps at night. His firms employ New Yorkers. His investments shape the city’s skyline. His philanthropy endows institutions that serve New Yorkers every day. The pied-à-terre framing obscures a simpler truth: The civic contributions of people like Griffin are real and ongoing, whether or not they qualify as full-time residents under the tax code.
And yet such figures are increasingly treated as props rather than partners. Cities like New York rely on dense networks of cooperation among public officials, private actors, and civic institutions. That cooperation does not require agreement. It does require a baseline of mutual recognition and restraint. When leaders model contempt, signaling that success is suspect and individuals are fair game, that baseline erodes.
Consider the incentives. If extraordinary philanthropy and wealth is met with derision, why would others step forward? If investment is treated as exploitation by default, why would capital remain? If civic contribution becomes a liability rather than a virtue, why would anyone take the risk?
Capital is mobile. So is talent. When Griffin moved Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, Chicago lost a major employer, a taxpayer, and a civic leader whose philanthropy had reshaped its institutions. The lesson for New York should be obvious.
Cities cannot function on spectacle. They cannot sustain growth if those who build, invest, and give are treated less as partners than as enemies.
New York does not need less debate. It needs a restoration of civic norms. The question is no longer what we tolerate on campus. It is what we are willing to accept from the people who govern us.