Bread & Roses

On Lucy Dacus, Mamdani, and the Challenge for the Left

Listening to Lucy Dacus’s rendition of “Bread and Roses” at the inauguration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was uncanny. Her voice is undeniably beautiful, yet the song itself felt out of time. It was as if Dacus’s soft, almost melancholic delivery itself could expose the distance between the song’s original meaning and the politics it now inhabits.

“Bread and Roses” was a demand of the early 20th century labor movement rooted in material struggle. It posited that workers deserved both “bread,” the means to survive, and also “roses,” access to beauty, leisure, education, and time — a full and “good” life.

It was a radical, socialist call — an insistence that organizing for better wages was not enough. Something else, less tangible yet as essential as life itself, was required. First written as a poem in 1911 and later set to music, the song became a rallying cry that spread through mass strikes among factory workers, many of them organized and led by women. Its power was made possible by shared physical space and a politics receptive to collective organizing. The country stood on the verge of industrial modernity, a period of upheaval that nonetheless remained dense with concentrated social ties. This density allowed workers to organize across ethnicity and gender.

Credit, Lucy Dacus on X

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union not only won benefits through collective bargaining, it built an entire social world, including health care clinics, unemployment benefits, sports leagues, leisure activities, and cooperative housing. Labor journals — written and published by workers themselves — held corporate bosses accountable while keeping members informed of their rights and the state of the movement.

Lacking this physical and social infrastructure, today’s mass politics largely exist online. The digital realm, which Mamdani’s campaign dominated so successfully, can mobilize mutual aid, canvassing, and IRL town halls, yet these efforts still flow downstream from the internet. Showing up to a DSA meeting in Brooklyn is not the same as inhabiting a preexisting social infrastructure. You may recognize a few faces, but the encounter remains largely episodic and provisional.

In such an experience, the logic of the internet has colonized physical space. Even when bodies gather in the same room, the form of politics remains shaped by online conditions. As with online, you can enter and leave these spaces without any major commitment or forgoing the comforts of anonymity.

As Anton Cebalo argues in an excellent essay for Noema, political movements today more closely resemble an online swarm than a rooted community and are driven by what he calls anti-politics. People arrive motivated less by shared meaning or a positive vision than by what Slavoj Žižek describes as the dominant political ideology of our time: cynicism. In Cebalo’s telling, suspicion replaces purpose, and politics becomes something to be watched rather than inhabited.

This environment, shaped by collapsing material opportunity and the rise of what Martin Gurri describes as a horizontal, decentralized information ecosystem, has proven capable of producing political figures as different as Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Mamdani. Despite their differences, these leaders emerged from the same structural conditions.

One’s experience, whether at a Trump rally or a Mamdani event, is ultimately that of a spectator — a witness to a performance of politics rather than an active participant in it. This is why watching Dacus’s performance felt at once emotionally charged yet hollow. You cheer along, take pictures that signal belonging in one of the internet swarms and then go home. This is not the fault of the individual, it’s the dominant political and social framework of our time.

As Cebalo argues, these swarms of anti-politics can unseat incumbents and usher in new leaders because they are fueled by what he calls “unpopular populism.” But once inside systems of power, they struggle to maintain legitimacy. Figures like Obama and Trump have proven not to be solutions to this crisis, but symptoms of it. Trump won a second term more out of a cry that the public still held control than any positive vision for the future. Mamdani may be headed in the same direction unless he can mobilize something materially and socially different.

What exactly that would look like is difficult to pin down, but here I strongly agree with Cebalo that it must transcend a largely online environment of cynicism and negation and return to materiality. Material politics has never been top-down. It requires a substantive, diverse movement rooted in organization and solidarity — something that can only exist through revived civic infrastructure. This means rebuilding places of belonging such as unions, churches, and community centers. It means relinking politics to local ties and needs, to neighborly introductions, and to forms of shared life capable of producing not just moments of hope, but durable legitimacy. This is not simply a call for holding more in-person events or gatherings. It is a far more demanding, relational project — one that cannot be siloed as “politics” alone, but must center human connection and shared meaning.

Without these spaces, politics, much like Dacus’s performance, becomes a call for help into a void not equipped to answer. It can only mimic change by cycling new leaders into power through rituals designed to preserve the appearance of public control. For “Bread and Roses” to mean anything in the twenty-first century, it must be redefined to fit the conditions of our time.

As Cebalo notes, what once took the form of mass party politics has, over the last half-century, transformed into cartelized parties. Rather than remaining receptive to the public, political parties are now largely insulated from it. They legitimate their authority not through consent, but through spectacle. As long as the public continues to mistake spectacle — the daily outrage, the aesthetics of campaigns, the reality-show quality of politics — for political purpose itself, a parasitic ruling elite has found a way to survive. Parties become forums for professional political elites to maneuver among themselves.

In light of this, simply recreating civic life as it existed in the 1910s is not enough. We live in an era in which technocracy substitutes for democratic accountability, governed by a permanent class of experts and managers.

Calls to rebuild civic life, while absolutely necessary, must also reckon with how many Americans now view the state with suspicion, frustration, and distrust. Any viable politics must transcend both the cartelized state and the digital swarm.

Here the metaphor of “Bread and Roses” can be reimagined. A movement that promises bread must prove it can deliver material results capable of addressing the anger and discontent fueling contemporary politics. Doing so requires fundamentally altering what we understand as political action. As Cebalo notes, citing Christopher Lasch, Americans since the 1970s have been shaped by a “therapeutic sensibility” that redirects politics away from public life and inward toward the self. Redefining “bread” means returning politics to the realm of the personal and the doable — making it relevant to the material survival of everyday people.

This must occur in tandem with the “roses,” which today represent not simply beauty or a revival of civic life, but the rebuilding of another social realm— third spaces that feel like “a home away from home.” Only spaces of this kind—what Cebalo notes have historically been called a “second culture” — can transcend the fleeting digital swarm. They must be places of meaning that exist apart from the spectacle of the state and the churn of online politics. That exist to rebuke the loss of legitimacy from the state by rebuilding it on different terms. It’s only outside the gaze of the state that people can climb out of their default role as spectators and become active participants not just in “politics” but as relational human beings.

At the heart of this moment is a profound disorientation, an inability to understand what is happening or how to move forward. If we continue to reach for symbols from the past — singing songs from the 1910s as though they can be copied and pasted into today’s political crisis — we’ll only reproduce the conditions of the crisis. It’s why politics feels so emotionally charged while simultaneously incapable of sustaining meaning.

Without the material and social worlds that once gave “bread and roses” their force, the spectacle will continue to substitute for legitimacy. For “bread and roses” to mean anything in the twenty-first century, the metaphor itself must be redefined — not as a song we perform, but as a structure we inhabit. Only then will the spectacle itself be overpowered by something legitimate.