Which way, recovery or revolution?

With less than 90 days to go before the Democratic primary for mayor, the big, unanswered question is the same one we began the political season with: is our city in the mood for recovery, or revolution?

It’s not an idle question. Some New York activists and political leaders believe the city needs fundamental economic transformation, and are aiming to make this year’s elections a referendum on changing the system.

“Our goal is not to reform the U.S. capitalist economy, but to dismantle and move beyond it,” read the opening words of the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed six City Council candidates.

While the DSA has not endorsed a mayoral candidate, its approach finds echoes in the race. The website for candidate Dianne Morales, for instance, says: “Our system is not broken; it is working as it was designed to work. You don’t reform an inequitable, exclusive system. You transform it.”

Candidate Maya Wiley’s website says: “The tinkering treadmill of incrementalism must give way to the transformational.”

An alternative view is that New York, having lost 631,000 jobs in a single year due to COVID — the greatest one-year decline since World War II — needs to get people back to work as soon as possible, with a focus on results, not rhetoric.

Ray McGuire, who has raised far more money than any other candidate for mayor, thinks New Yorkers have heard enough lectures about inequality, poverty and the need to transform the economic system.

“We need leadership that meets the moment. And today we don’t have that leadership,” McGuire told me. “It is very clear that this city has been ineptly managed.”

For at least half a century, every winning candidate for mayor has successfully proposed an about-face — or, at least, a course correction — from his predecessor. Ed Koch literally ran against (and beat) Abe Beame in 1977; David Dinkins did the same to Koch 12 years later; and Rudy Giuliani knocked out Dinkins in 1993.

Mike Bloomberg replaced Giuliani’s public feuds and confrontations with a pointedly less combative approach. Bill de Blasio, reversing direction, got elected by promising an attack on problems Bloomberg had ignored or exacerbated, including out-of-control stop-and-frisk policing and an exploding crisis of economic inequality.

What comes after de Blasio?

“People are looking for something different,” said McGuire. “They’re looking for a leader in whom they can trust, and whom they believe has experience. Not a press release, but a track record of having done it. With receipts.” (To hear our full conversation, check out “You Decide,” my podcast).

McGuire, who was raised in poverty, is part of a small group of seriously bright, fiercely ambitious kids who entered Harvard in the 1970s when the university first began admitting sizable numbers of Black students.

Prior to 1970, Harvard College typically admitted 12 or fewer Black students each year, amounting to 1% or less of each class. Harvard Business School was even worse, admitting a total of 42 Black students between 1915 and 1968.

Those numbers changed dramatically in the 1970s, thanks to the pressure of the Civil Rights Movement and the patient, painstaking recruitment efforts of talent-spotting university administrators like David Evans and Walter Leonard.

Some famous standouts among the affirmative action babies of that era include the scholar Cornel West (class of 1973) and Dr. Mary Bassett (class of 1974), who later became our city’s health commissioner. Harvard Law turned out future corporate leaders Kenneth Chenault (class of 1976, and former CEO of American Express) and Ken Frazier (class of 1978, now CEO of Merck). McGuire was on the tail end of that same cohort, earning undergraduate, law and business degrees before arriving on Wall Street in the mid-1980s, on the ground floor of a financial revolution that laid the legal and financial basis of modern corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Rising to the top of Citigroup and advising on an estimated $250 billion worth of corporate deals, he says, qualifies him to lead the revival of New York’s economy. McGuire’s economic plan calls for the speedy creation of 500,000 jobs through major infrastructure investments, partnerships with tech companies, and a tax holiday, along with other subsidies designed to jump-start small businesses.

He’s scornful of the socialist rhetoric floating around city politics these days.

“You don’t meet those systemic inequities by a socialist approach,” he said. “We need to figure out how we give people opportunities. This is not about a handout.”

The path to victory for McGuire and several other candidates — Kathryn Garcia, Shaun Donovan, Scott Stringer and Eric Adams come to mind — is based on a bet that voters don’t want to end capitalism, but just want a competent manager to guide us out of the economic crisis.

We’ll have an answer in less than three months.