New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the subway on his way to City Hall on Friday.Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/The Associated Press

Sharan Kaur is a principal at Navigator and the former deputy chief of staff to former finance minister Bill Morneau.

At the stroke of midnight, in a decommissioned subway station beneath the streets of Manhattan, the old world finally flickered out. Standing under the vaulted Guastavino arches of the abandoned City Hall stop, Zohran Mamdani took his oath of office on a Quran.

Mr. Mamdani’s election victory was a cinematic heist of the political status quo. A 34-year-old, South Asian Muslim, self-proclaimed socialist won the keys to the world’s financial capital. If you had described this scene to a political consultant 20 years ago, they would have called it a fever dream. Today, in our era of political surrealism, it is simply Friday.

We live in a world where the traditional “type” has been obliterated. On one end of the bridge, you have a reality-TV real estate mogul turned President who governs via social media outburst; on the other, a young Muslim socialist leading a city that Wall Street long........

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