New York has always been, in its own imagination and the country’s, a city of self-regarding and often contradictory superlatives — the biggest, brightest, richest, harshest, give-us-your-tired-est, little-too-wired-est spot on the American map, which might as well render those other cities in the sepia tone of afterthoughts, anyway.

So it can feel especially disorienting, for a place so confident of its position in the general pecking order, to find New York edging toward a moment of such spectacular uncertainty about what it is, whom it’s for, what happens next.

Answers are coming, whether the city likes it or not.

A volatile mayoral election this Tuesday appears poised to reshuffle and reconstitute the longstanding power structures of a city that so often sets the political, cultural and financial course well beyond its boroughs.

The New Yorkers who run much of Washington are heckling one another during an interminable federal shutdown, with accelerating consequences for America’s largest city.

And a collision of local and national forces — escalating deportation campaigns; searing mutual political disdain and disillusion; economic angst across income strata — seems primed to scramble New York’s very sense of itself, compelling it to confront some of the surface paradoxes that are core to its identity.

The capitalist capital of the world is now the epicenter of an ascendant and impatient socialist-led rebellion over affordability, over who gets to make a life in the New York that bred Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street — and now finds alums and avatars of both camps credibly contending that the future is theirs.