STARTING FROM ZERO: Take the nuclear option: Let Mamdani win the mayoral race so NYC can start over from scratch.

As alarm bells ring over the New York City mayoral race, an odd sentiment is starting to gain traction across the business community: Just give up.

Just sit tight and let the ill-equipped Maoist Zohran Mamdani win in November.

Let him unleash his creepy, dogmatic socialist policies on the masses to teach them valuable lessons — both economic and cultural — about wokeness and progressivism, and more broadly its stranglehold on the Democratic Party.

I’m starting to agree.

A fleeing middle class

Let the city sink into the abyss.

Let Mamdani’s policies force out business and prod more upper- and middle-class residents to flee.

Let the city declare bankruptcy — which will happen if Mamdani gets his way.

We can then start from scratch.

Detroit did it and the last time I was there, its downtown was pristine.

Plus, we’re headed there anyway, right?

“Downtown Detroit has rebounded since the city’s 2013 bankruptcy, but acres of vacant land, blighted properties and a lack of private capital have kept the city’s other neighborhoods from enjoying a similar renaissance,” Real estate Website CoStar noted last year.  New York similarly collapsed in the late ’60s thanks to John Lindsay:

The crisis of 1965 was comparative. Liberal politicians like Lindsay believed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had worked out scientific answers to our great social problems, so that the city should be judged not by its own past but by what it could be if men of vision were given the power to remake it.

In the series, which cleared Lindsay’s path to City Hall, he vowed to get New York “going again.” Instead, he oversaw as mayor (and with the editor of “New York City in Crisis” soon joining his administration as a top aide) the city’s decent into the very catastrophe the Trib had imagined.

In the midst of an economic boom, crime exploded. Instead of reforming what had, in fact, been the best big city school system in America, he left it in tatters. He promised to better incorporate African Americans but left the city polarized.

It wasn’t until Rudy Giuliani was elected in 1993 that the city began to claw its way back, until Bill de Blasio took office in 2014. Are New Yorkers prepared for another decades-long collapse?

(Classical reference in headline.)