So we’re back to the strongman. Not just in Washington, but here in New York City, where Andrew Cuomo is seeking to restart his career by making the novel move from Albany to Gracie Mansion. With the Democratic primary taking place in June, he’s dominating the race.

How is this possible? Wasn’t it just yesterday that Mr. Cuomo fled office in a cloud of scandal?

New Yorkers, though, have a long history of turning to tough, even ruthless leaders when they fear their city is lurching out of control.

“We know that today our New York City is in trouble,” Mr. Cuomo said in a nimble announcement speech, evoking both the glorious achievements of its liberal past and name-checking all the problems of its unsettling present: the mentally ill homeless, the dangerous vibe of the subway, the empty storefronts, the random violence. “The city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis.”

New York is not, by any reasonable definition, in crisis. It is the wealthiest city in the world, one visited by over 65 million tourists in 2024. Most types of felonies have fallen over the past year, and homicides are down to a small fraction of the peak murder totals the city reached in the 1990s.

Yet it cannot be said that America was in crisis, either, when we returned to office the most radical strongman in our nation’s history. Indeed, the resurrection of Mr. Cuomo is roiling not just New York City but also a national Democratic Party convulsed just now over how fierce its resistance to President Trump should be. Can Mr. Cuomo be the “Democratic Trump” some claim the party needs, at least as much celebrity as politician, willing and able to bulldoze over both the opposition and the many scandals of his past?

Much like the United States in 2024, if there is not one big thing wrong in New York right now, there are lots of smaller things wrong, and if together they do not constitute a crisis, they have left many in the city depressed and demoralized.

Storefronts all over town are vacant and often remain so for years. The subway is not nearly as dysfunctional as it was in the 1970s and ’80s, but it is undeniably filthy and often menacing. Crime remains very low there — but random, often terrifying assaults have almost doubled since 2014. Every time there’s news of someone getting pushed in front of a train, it’s hard not to imagine what you would do to keep that from happening to you.

Even our civil discourse — never high — has degenerated. Whatever one thinks of the protests over the war in Gaza, the insults and assaults directed at Jewish and Muslim people and institutions are unpardonable.

It feels as if any common ground, any universal idea of our city, is dissolving.

To fix this, many New Yorkers miss “the big dog,” as Mr. Cuomo was called as governor — or at least the father figure he played in his daily television appearances during the early days of the pandemic lockdowns. Protective and competent and wryly funny, bringing on his daughters and his brother to jest with him for the cameras. That Mr. Cuomo seemed like our shield against the vicissitudes of Mr. Trump’s let-them-eat-bleach approach to the deadliest pandemic in a century.

New Yorkers in droves fell for Mr. Cuomo’s reality show presentation (without seeming to notice that this was the same medium that worked for Mr. Trump). We laughingly called ourselves Cuomosexuals and showered him with praise and awards.

He got a $5 million book contract. He got a special Emmy Award. (“The first ever Emmy for controlling the narrative,” scoffed John Kaehny, the executive director of the public watchdog association Reinvent Albany.)

The crash, when it came, was swift and brutal. Some 13 charges of sexual harassment, most of them by young women pursuing their careers in government or media. Accusations that his administration exacerbated the Covid crisis by requiring nursing homes to accept infected patients, then covered up thousands of deaths. An ethics panel ordered him to return his book advance. (The legal battle is ongoing.) The Emmy was retracted. On Aug. 11, 2021 — with impeachment investigations underway in the New York State Assembly — “the love gov,” as he called himself, announced his imminent resignation.

“New York was perhaps the first great city in history to be ruled by men of the people, not as an isolated phenomenon of the Gracchi or the commune but as a persisting, established pattern,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1961.

Unfortunately, most of the men — incredibly, there has never been a female mayor of New York — have been terrible choices. They have included nincompoops and nonentities, the clueless and the corrupt, the hopelessly idealistic and the mobbed-up and even a secessionist. (Fernando Wood wanted the city and Long Island to follow the Confederacy out of the Union and form a new nation called Tri-Insula.) Then there was James J. Walker, our Jazz Age mayor, who took months of vacation every year, rarely got to his desk before noon, had a nightclub built in Central Park in which to cavort with his cronies and his mistress and had a hangover room installed in the basement of City Hall.

Yet New York had never had what it does in Eric Adams: a mayor who until recently was openly held as a political hostage by a vengeance-seeking presidential administration. When Judge Dale Ho of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York mercifully put an end to this situation by dismissing the government’s corruption charges against the mayor, Mr. Adams — a buffoonish figure in the best of times — celebrated by announcing that he would run for re-election as an independent and holding up a book filled with conspiracy theories by Mr. Trump’s bizarre new head of the F.B.I., Kash Patel.

In New York politics, the fun stops when the bad times return. Then we want that strongman.

Someone like DeWitt Clinton, who drove the grid system through Manhattan — and, eventually, the Erie Canal through New York State. Or Fiorello La Guardia, who pulled New York through the Depression. Ed Koch was viewed as the mayor who tamed the ungovernable city of the 1970s, and Rudy Giuliani ran as the restorer of civil order in the 1990s before becoming the hero of Sept. 11.

Yet for all his swagger, Mr. Cuomo as governor was mostly the opposite of the strongman we seem to want. In his Albany, the buck didn’t stop at his desk; it didn’t stop anywhere. It was his administration that gave us “the most expensive mile of subway track on Earth,” pandering to both contractors and unions, according to an exposé by Brian M. Rosenthal in The Times. His Buffalo Billion initiative, intended to transform that city’s industrial base, dissolved in bankruptcy and indictments — and profits for Elon Musk.

If Mr. Cuomo’s responsibility in the Covid nursing home scandal has never been established, his top aide admitted that she delayed the release of information regarding thousands of Covid deaths, and nine leading health officials resigned in his administration’s confused response to the pandemic. The “big, hard, important things” he boasted, in his announcement video, of accomplishing — the renovation of La Guardia International Airport, the construction of the Moynihan Train Hall and the replacement of the Kosciuszko Bridge — were largely the result of planning and funding started before he took office. One big thing that Mr. Cuomo carried through entirely on his own watch was a replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge, with a new $4 billion span that he named for his father — an achievement all his own that was soon plagued by snapping bolts and defective cables.

Mr. Cuomo has often taken a strongman’s proprietary attitude toward government, as when he created the Moreland Commission to investigate public corruption — then abruptly shut it down, notably after it nosed too close to some of his political allies.

At the same time, he has been maddeningly elusive about taking responsibility for anything. At various times as governor, he insisted that he was not in charge of the M.T.A. — before ordering the agency to accept a European model for repairs of the Williamsburg subway tunnel — and that he had no responsibility for the rail tunnels under the Hudson, vital to the city’s economic health.

“Why don’t you pay for it?” he berated members of the press. “It’s not my tunnel.”

This level of convenient, political schizophrenia can seem almost, well, Trumpian. Is this what we really want? A Democratic Trump?

Cities change, and they need to change if they are to prosper and live. It’s not always easy to judge just how those changes will work out. Too often, in our recent past, at least, the underpinnings of our strongmen have been racist, alienating policies such as stop and frisk and a narrowing of our city’s future that envisions filling it with only as many rich people or subsidized corporations as possible.

A truly strong man — or woman — should be able to speak truth while in power. To not only admit mistakes but also to learn from them. To invite a wide variety of advisers and advice in this great polyglot city of ours. To be able to say “no” but to know how to bring us together in our sorrows and our aspirations and to draw out from us the common sense of humanity that led so many of us or our ancestors to leave behind the tired quarrels and oppressions of other places and come to New York.

From all we have seen and heard in his long career, it is difficult to believe that we will find that strength in Andrew Cuomo.

Kevin Baker is the author, most recently, of “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City.”

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