Politics & Power Quote by Ron Chernow

New York’s swagger has always come from power without sovereignty, and Ron Chernow puts his finger on that asymmetry with a biographer’s instinct for the hidden wiring. By contrasting it with London and Paris, he’s not just ranking cities; he’s isolating a structural quirk that explains New York’s outsized influence and its perpetual sense of being slightly untethered.

“Financial capital” and “cultural capital” arrive as a confident pairing, the twin engines of modern prestige: money that moves markets and stories that move people. Then Chernow yanks the third leg away. “But not the political capital” is the twist that clarifies everything. Without ministries, parliaments, or presidential palaces, New York’s authority is persuasive rather than formal. It can set tastes, set prices, set agendas, yet it can’t directly set laws. That gap produces a particular city psychology: ambitious, restless, performative, sometimes resentful of Washington’s slow machinery, often happy to bypass it.

The subtext is also historical. Chernow’s work is steeped in the idea that American power was built as much in countinghouses and newsrooms as in statehouses. New York’s primacy emerges from private institutions - banks, publishers, theaters, galleries, later media conglomerates - that operate globally even when the city’s governance is municipal. It’s capitalism and culture as a kind of soft empire, one that doesn’t need to be “the capital” to act like it.