Reading this New York Times report on Eric Adams’s dropping out of the race — where Adams is described, with no sense of irony, as “politically moderate” and is quoted as warning against Zohran Mamdani’s desire to “destroy the very system we built together over generations” while Andrew Cuomo is quoted as saying, “We are facing an existential threat in an extreme radicalism that threatens the existence of this city as we know it” — it dawns on me that the Left is being presented with a golden opportunity. An opportunity that reminds me, seriously, of something only Abraham Lincoln was able to pull off.
Mamdani is running now against Cuomo, a corrupt sexual harasser, who has been aided from the start by Donald Trump. Trump is a corrupt sexual harasser who never met a law he didn’t want to break. Through pressure from Trump, Bill Ackman, and a combination of real estate developers, financiers, pro-Israel forces, Cuomo is now being helped by the stepping down of Adams, another corrupt politician whose bacon was saved only when Trump forced lower-tier federal prosecutors to drop the government’s corruption case against Adams in return for Adams’s helping Trump pursue his illegal and unconstitutional plan to deport immigrants.
Notice what Mamdani, already blessed with so many political gifts, has going for him here. Not only is he completely untainted by corruption. He’s never broken the law. He’s as clean as a whistle.
There was a time when that wouldn’t have been remarkable. We’ve reached a moment in our political development when it is. What’s more, that steadfast legality and sense of lawfulness belongs to a democratic socialist, a critic of Israel, a man who wants to freeze the rent, make buses free and fast, childcare universal, and life in New York affordable.
For decades, the Right has managed to claim for itself the mantle of law and order. Despite being serially lawless and disorderly. But now the…
Auteur: Corey Robin
