I completely missed the Hamilton discourse five years ago, but in the wake of the movie version’s release, there have been a new round of takes. Here I’ll give my own. I’m going to skip discussion of its merits as a play (I enjoyed it quite a bit—sue me) and go directly to discussing its politics.
You can sum up a lot of leftist criticisms of liberalism with this meme:
The joke is that the Democrats are as bad as Republicans, but they appeal to women and minorities. Instead of working to fundamentally change institutions and fix their underlying rot, liberals would rather address identitarian concerns as a kind of band-aid. Instead of addressing economic concerns, liberals are obssessed with cultural ones.
This is the cynical interpretation of the recent unrest following George Floyd’s murder: the powers that be can immediately take up the cause of Black Lives Matter and the broader demands for a reckoning with racism exactly because, despite their revolutionary airs, the changes they demand—diversification of elite institutions and its leadership—are not structural changes. The demands would change what the personnel of these institutions look like, but not how they run. Calls to “defund the police” of course does not fit this, but the rest of the broader happenings around the protests, which have been more successful in meeting their demands, do revolve around toppling statues, renaming institutions, firing problematic leaders—indeed, all cultural victories. We’ve yet to see whether these cultural victories can be leveraged into economic ones.
To be clear, I think this is an overblown interpretation, and there’s reason to believe that there will be real, substantive reforms to follow the protests. And identitarian concerns are themselves important ends that cannot be wholly subordinate to material ends. But regardless of whether the interpretation is overblown or not, Hamilton embodies the criticism because it takes the traditional narrative about the Founding Fathers and gives it a patina of diversity without challenging its fundamental assumptions. It uses non-white actors and non-white music to tell a triumphalist story about how white people founded America.1 It recasts the life of Hamilton as a “young, scrappy, and hungry” embodiment of hip-hop—he grew up poor, immigrated to the big city and became successful through his own hustle, had intense rivalries with Burr and Jefferson and the other Founders—to let minorities see that his life and struggles parallel theirs.
Regardless of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s intentions, his reframing of the founding has the insidious consequence of legitimizing its traditional narrative and occluding its real faults. As Lyra Monteiro notes:
In a country in which those of us who are not white men are still subjected to quotidian discrimination and continue to suffer from the legacies of our oppression on which the country was founded, to tell that history in a way that encourages people of color to feel closer to it only makes it harder for us to see clearly the inequalities that shape our lives…such a move does, however, work beautifully with the color-blind ideology promoted by white liberals. This musical is guilty of many of the same flaws as the vast majority of stories about the founding era: it glosses over the racism and the sexism involved in the founding our country, as if these were design flaws, not deliberate features.
There’s an argument to be made that Hamilton has been so massively popular and successful exactly because its politics are so anodyne and reassuring, that it does not tear down the story of the founding but instead makes it more superficially inclusive. In that, it’s a great update of American civic religion. But it’s long past time to take the narrative of this religion uncritically, one where minorities play no role in the shaping of its founding, and whose oppression can be acknowledged as part of this religion and yet does not fundamentally alter its expression. For those imprisoned into oblivion, it must be cold comfort to see that their jailers now look like them.
Footnotes
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Lyra Monteiro’s review essay goes into extensive detail about the erasure of black people in the play. This is most notable in the almost complete absence of slave characters, save for an oblique reference to Sally Hemings. Even when slavery is mentioned, it mostly serves to highlight the anti-slavery efforts of white characters, or as a cudgel against southern landowners, as in Hamilton’s repartees to Jefferson. ↩