In an interesting piece at Compact Matthew Gasda argues that the musical Hamilton and its changing fate in the post-Trump era is indicative of broader changes on the American left:
In essence, the “Hamilton decade” can be defined as an era in the American performing arts in which the rhetoric of theater masked a deeply elitist, self-serving, and very belated Federalism.
The Hamilton decade in American theater recast US history, suggesting that progress is brought about by noble liberal elites (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton could be a character on West Wing), and not by the democratic process or demands of the masses. We might call this “the Great Empath theory of history.” The prevailing trend in American theater, from Hamilton to Hillary’s appearance at the Tonys, invites progressive audiences to simultaneously accept and purge their own participation in America’s great original sins while affirming the power of elite meritocrats to redeem the nation.
For Gasda, Hamilton, as presented by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, is a kind of proxy for Hillary Clinton—the technocratic elite who obtains power through less-than-democratic means and then seeks to remake America in her preferred image.
He continues:
The era’s paradigmatic plays—think Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society, or Heidi Schrec’s What the Constitution Means to Me—all express the idea that we can have some democracy, but it needs to be tempered, controlled, and managed by meritocratic elites (especially lawyers). These are the people who clean up after democracy when it is done trashing the house. The demos is regressive, bordering on evil, responsible for America’s structural sins, and we can’t trust it—ever.
This progressive historiography is smooth, and basically constructs American history as a long running battle between good professional-managerial classes (starting with Hamilton) and evil demagogues (starting with Aaron Burr). It isn’t hard to see why establishment politicians want to attach themselves to plays that promote this message.
The piece is worth reading, but I think gets both Hamilton and Hamilton wrong in some ways that are significant.
To begin, the drama of Hamilton is not really bound up in "good managers" vs "bad demagogues," as Gasda says. Burr never really has enough power to rise to the level of a demagogue in the first place. But more importantly, this framing almost completely misrepresents the heart of Miranda's story.
In Miranda's hands, Hamilton is a symbol of the immigrant striver, the outsider who arrives in America and through pluck, talent, grit, and resolve overcomes the odds and attains success. Burr, in contrast, is the cunning child of the elite who goes through life only seeking to not lose his position of security and, therefore, constantly shrinking back from doing the hard, necessary thing. Everything he does is calculated based on its practical impact on his social standing. Thus his motto in the musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." Burr is the child of wealth who lives with the fear of losing what he was born into. So he "waits for it." Hamilton comes from nothing and so has nothing to lose. Framed this way, the Clintonian figure in the musical is not Hamilton, but Burr.
Hamilton, in contrast, is constantly scornful of elites, eager to fight, and remarkably indifferent to what is politically effective. For better and worse, the man took shot after shot after shot. Sometimes this served him well and sometimes it proved catastrophic. But there are very few ways in which the man Hamilton or even the character of the same name in Hamilton can be described as a Clintonian figure.
The tell that Gasda has misunderstood the musical (while still arriving at a defensible conclusion) comes perhaps most clearly in how he applies to the two Democratic presidential candidates prior to 2020: President Obama and Secretary Clinton. In Gasda's hands, the two represent the same basic impulse—a less than fully democratic instinct to trust management over the people and to seek to sequester power in the hands of organizationally competent social engineers. But this isn't quite right.
What Hamilton wanted was an ordered democracy strong enough to stand on its own feet. The reason for his imperial fantasies (and they really were fantasies) had less to do with Hamilton styling himself an emperor or desiring an emperor and more to do with his assessment of what America needed to do in order to be materially secure as a nation. This is not an idle point; though forgotten today the revolution succeeded in part because of strategic economic choices made by largely forgotten figures.
To take just one example, though an enormously consequential one, the only reason Washington was able to even get his army to Yorktown to trap Cornwallis and end the war was because of a personal loan provided to the military by the forgotten founding father Robert Morris. Morris's wealth allowed the cash-strapped government to pay its soldiers wages and the costs associated with transporting the army the requisite distance to Yorktown. Without that, the Americans would not have made it to Yorktown and the British would not have been trapped and forced into surrender. Hamilton understood the necessity of an economy that could produce such wealth in a way that the other founders did not.
These are the sorts of concerns that drove Hamilton. If he has an anti-democratic, managerial tick, it comes, ironically, from his belief that complex industrialized economies are necessary to secure democratic life and, therefore, highly competent managers of those complex economies are also necessary to secure democracy. That may sound counter-intuitive, but it is precisely what Hamilton had witnessed during the Revolution. Better than most, he understood the material inputs required to "rise up" and he also understood what would be required to secure America's place on the global stage, thereby allowing her to continue to exist as a democratic republic independent of European control.
Yet there is some sense, I think, in which Gasda's conclusion is not wrong: the Hamilton decade in 21st century America did end up representing a kind of semi-democratic top-down management system overseen by technocratic elites. Miranda himself has been pulled in this direction, I think, as has Obama. In many ways you could argue that this video of Miranda performing at the White House, eight months before the 2016 election and performing a song with strong undertones likening Obama to Washington, marked the end of an era, something like the old photos of European monarchs on boating holidays in June of 1914. They had no idea what was coming.
Gasda is vindicated, I think, by the scene itself: The striver is now in the halls of power, far removed from ordinary working class Americans, and now surrounded not by Hamiltons, but rather mostly by Burrs. And in his retirement this striver will not "sit under his own vine and fig tree... in the midst of my fellow citizens," but will become a part of the Burr class—jet setting with the preposterously wealthy and dispensing Fortune Cookie-style wisdom in handsomely compensated media opportunities.
But this to me reads not as a problem with Hamilton or Hamilton, but rather as a commentary on some failure in American life. Our Hamiltons, what few we still produce, lack outlets. There is some sense in which this contradiction is baked into Hamilton, as we already acknowledged. Because complex wealth-generating economies are necessary to secure the independence of democracies, managers of complex systems who get there not through democratic means but through meritocratic competence, will also be necessary. And it should not surprise us if over time those wealth-generating engines and the managers who oversee them would become cut off from the very norms and mode of living their roles are meant to protect. As a result, yesterday's Hamiltons are today's Burrs.
Yet if there is a solution to this then it seems to me that Hamilton itself hints at it: After Alexander's young death at Burr's hands, his widow lives for nearly a half century. What marks those years, however, is not a life of luxury and pomp removed from the concerns or presence of ordinary people. Rather, Eliza Hamilton sought to carry on her husband's work, building orphanages to help shelter our would-be future Hamiltons and building memorials to help us remember what we have received.
The solution, you might say, is not technical in nature, at least not exclusively so, but is also moral; it is a choice to arrange one's life in a certain way, to forego certain opportunities you might otherwise have, to continue to give of yourself so that others can be lifted up. And why arrange your life in such a way? In Eliza's case it is propelled by love of her husband and a desire to do what he might have done "if (he) had more time." But it is propelled also by something more, I think. Consider these words from his final letter to Eliza, from which one of the musical's final songs takes its name:
This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of Religion, my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.
There is a relationship between the redeeming grace of which Hamilton spoke and the impulse to move out into the world toward one's fellow man in hopes of serving him—and this impulse, I'd note, is highly friendly to and conducive of democratic life.
If our Hamiltons now too often become Burrs, it might be because the grace that animated Hamilton in his final days (after much wondering) has been forgotten. We have instead taken the path of Burr, the man whose "grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher," who claims that "there are things that the homilies and hymns don't teach ya."