Burr, check what we got
Mister Lafayette, hard rock like Lancelot
I think your pants look hot!
We’ve reached the midpoint of February.
Since you are still reading “29 Posts in 29 Days,” you must not have been too riled up by my “overrated” and “underrated” choices so far.
Perhaps I need to try a little harder.
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It is hard overstate how much love the public and the critics have given to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 “hip-hopera,” Hamilton.
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Hamilton won no fewer than 11 Tony Awards in 2016, plus the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Earlier this month, it was announced that Disney had agreed to pay a record $75 million for movie rights to the show. (The Hamilton movie will hit theaters in October 2021.)
People were so crazy about Hamilton that the Department of the Treasury cancelled plans to replace Alexander Hamilton’s image on the $10 bill with that of Harriet Tubman. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew decided instead to put Tubman on the $20 bill in place of the politically incorrect Andrew Jackson.
Given all that, do you really think there’s any chance that I’m going to say Hamilton is underrated?
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A lot of historians think Hamilton got Hamilton all wrong. He was far from being a progressive, and he wasn’t pro-immigrant. And it’s likely he was a slave owner (like many of the Founding Fathers) – at the least, he married into a slaveowning family.
But fans of Hamilton – especially upper-middle-class white fans of Hamilton – couldn’t care less about that. For many of them, gushing over Hamilton is an easy way to virtue signal – sort of like voting for Barack Obama in 2008.
Someone I know said back then that Obama was appealing in part because he was black, but not too black – voting for him was a convenient, low-cost way for white people to demonstrate that they weren’t racists.
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| Lin-Manuel Miranda |
I have a feeling there are a lot of white people who are saying they are completely blown away even though they didn’t really understand half of the things the people on stage were saying. They just want to solidify their liberal bona fides and how cool they are: “Yeah, I love Hamilton. Yeah, I get it, I’m hip.”
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Progressive Alex Nichols wrote an article in Current Affairs magazine in 2016 titled “You Should Be Terrified That People Who like Hamilton Run Our Country”
As Nichols pointed out, Hamilton was beloved by politicians of all persuasions:
The Obamas were not the only members of the political establishment to come down with a ghastly case of Hamiltonmania. Nearly every figure in D.C. has apparently been to see the show, in many cases being invited for a warm backstage schmooze with Miranda. Biden saw it. Mitt Romney saw it. The Bush daughters saw it. Rahm Emanuel saw it the day after the Chicago teachers’ strike over budget cuts and school closures. Hillary Clinton went to see the musical in the evening after having been interviewed by the FBI in the morning. The Clinton campaign has also been fundraising by hawking Hamilton tickets; for $100,000 you can watch a performance alongside Clinton herself.
Nichols snipes at Michelle Obama for lauding Hamilton as the “best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life,” which he says “raises disquieting questions about the level of cultural exposure offered in the Princeton undergraduate curriculum.”
But what really bothers Nichols is that the first African-American president was so effusive about a play that ducked the question of slavery:
The more troubling questions about the country’s origins are instantly vanished, as an era built on racist forced labor is transformed into a colorful, culturally progressive, and politically unobjectionable extravaganza.
Nichols isn’t surprised by Obama’s blind spot when it came to Hamilton because he doesn’t think Obama’s presidency really moved the needle when it came to advancing progressive causes:
Contemporary progressivism has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity. The president will continue to expand the national security state at the same rate as his predecessor, but at least he will be black. Predatory lending will drain the wealth from African American communities, but the board of Goldman Sachs will have several black members. Inequality will be rampant and worsening, but the 1% will at least “look like America.” The actual racial injustices of our time will continue unabated, but the power structure will be diversified so that nobody feels quite so bad about it. Hamilton is simply this tendency’s cultural-historical equivalent; instead of worrying ourselves about the brutal origins of the American state, and the lasting economic effects of those early inequities, we can simply turn the Founding Fathers black and enjoy the show.
Obama once told an interviewer that Hamilton was “the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on during my entire political career.”
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| Hamilton fans Obama and Cheney |
That is, of course, false. Other points of agreement [between Obama and Cheney] include drone strikes, Guantanamo, the NSA, and mass deportation.
In closing, Nichols reiterates the point:
Barack Obama deported more immigrants than any other president and expanded the drone program in order to kill almost 3,500 people – but he gave patronage to a neoliberal nerdcore musical. God bless this great land.
You can click here to read Nichols’s contrarian take on Hamilton in its entirety.
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My real problem with Hamilton is the music, which purports to be hip-hop but really isn’t. To paraphrase something I said above, the music in Hamilton is hip-hop – but not too hip-hop.
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Click here to listen to “My Shot,” from Act I of Hamilton.
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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