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 cat is out of the bag on that lawlessness and disorderliness. Hardly anyone disputes it or doesn’t see it. The Republicans embrace it. And so do the Democrats who work with them to stop Mamdani.

And here we come back to Lincoln. Lincoln was a smart politician who believed in his bones in the rule of law but who also sensed, from his earliest years, the ambient and aspirational lawlessness at the heart of slavery. In the lead-up to the election of 1860, Lincoln used that charge brilliantly against the Democrats and the slavocracy. There was a thirst, a grasping, a will to will, an irrepressible desire that would not be contained, at the heart of slavery, a lust for power at the heart of the white master, that Lincoln cast as the emblem of lawlessness. Not in a fussy rule-following way. No, in a way that showed that no one who was not a lover of slavery would be allowed to ever live peacefully in the country.

“What will convince them?” Lincoln asked of the slavers. What would convince them that they could live without total power over everything and anything in the country? What would convince that they needn’t turn the entire country into a plantation in order to preserve their own?

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

Here was the final blow, cast by Lincoln, speaking directly to the slavers:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

Now here’s the thing about Lincoln. As scholars like Jim Oakes and Matt Karp have shown, the Republicans were in fact steadfast about the ultimate destruction of slavery, even before Lincoln was elected in 1860. They had created a mass political party centered on that project. They envisioned two paths or plans for it: one, through choking it off in the territories, the other, through the prosecution of a revolutionary war, should it come.

The brilliance of Lincoln was that he was able to cast this revolutionary plan — and it was revolutionary — as not revolutionary at all, but as defensive, as “conservative,” in the nomenclature of the day. He said so, in his Cooper Union Address. It was anything but. It did show an ultimate fidelity to living under the law, a republican abhorrence of domination as tied to lawlessness. In other words, it was much a social and economic vision of the rule of law as it was a political or legal vision (something liberals who celebrate Lincoln today might learn from). And would require a massive social upheaval and economic transformation of society to get there. (Again, something liberals who celebrate Lincoln today might learn from.)

Mamdani is not Lincoln. Mamdani is Mamdani, and we are living in our own time, in 2025, not 1860. We are not confronting chattel slavery. But the rule of law — and constitutional politics — is practically dead. Not the rule of law and constitutional politics as a liberal trope or distracting discourse of conservatism but as a vital principle for any kind of society, including a socialist democracy.

Mamdani — and all who support him — have a chance to cast his democratic socialism, his alleged “extremism,” as very much tied to the creation of a lawful society.

We don’t live in such a society anymore. Trump shows it. Cuomo shows it. Adams shows it. And the New York Times repeating talking points from Adams, Cuomo, and Trump also shows it.

The question is why. It’s not because bad characters arose on the scene. Those bad characters reflect a larger lawlessness that has set in among a ruling class that is one part oligarchy and one part sexual predators club. (Greg Grandin has a brilliant argument, which he has mooted to me in several phone conversations and which I really hope he develops into an article, that the winning of the Cold War was not about neoliberalism or the end of communism; it was about the creation of an elite circle of Caligulas, whose main desire is to prey on teenage girls. It’s the height of imperial decadence.)

If we are to restore or create — take your pick, Lincoln’s genius was that he remained strategically ambiguous on whether it was the one or the other — a lawful civilization, we need to take the path to democratic socialism. That is the promise of Zohran Mamdani, if only as a baby step.