I’m a Black millennial, I write about politics, and I love music. Yet for reasons too complicated to puzzle through, I recently found myself in San Francisco’s Orpheum Theater watching “Hamilton” for what was only the first time. It was an amazing, immersive journey into a past so distant that dramatizing it now requires elaborate stylings and gymnastic lyrics — and not just the era of our nation’s founding, but the Obama era, too.
To a degree that would have been hard to see when the show made its bow, “Hamilton,” now celebrating its 10th anniversary, doesn’t just capture the political sensibility of the era — and a kind of liberal optimism that is today hard to remember; it also contains the contradictions that ended that era. Revisiting it in 2025’s irreconcilably different national climate offers some lessons on how the country could seem to move so far, so fast.
Since at least the Civil War, Alexander Hamilton’s fluctuating reputation has operated as a kind of barometer of American’s faith in its union. When America feels unified in purpose and the economy is humming, Hamilton is a prophet whose economic vision birthed a future global powerhouse. When our outlook turns down, he’s an economic royalist whose policies set the stage for inequality and oligarchy.
If Thomas Jefferson was the founding’s concept artist, Hamilton was its foreman. The founders each envisioned different futures for the country’s political and economic structure. But as Ron Chernow argues in the biography that “Hamilton” is based on, Hamilton got the closest. We live in Hamilton’s vision. And the musical invites you to live in a vision, too: an America whole but unfinished, waves of progress bringing it closer and closer to its founding ideals. It is a meritocracy wrung clean of bias, whose creed is both a promise and invitation to anyone talented and hardworking enough to lay claim to it. Call it the Hamilton consensus. It once seemed ascendant. Why did it fall apart?
“Hamilton” is enthusiastically overstuffed with scraps of history and bits of references. I had encountered Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrical density from his lovely work in “Encanto” and “Moana.” Applied to this classic American story of uplift, the detail venerates the founders by vivifying and humanizing them.
Miranda’s “young, scrappy and hungry” protagonist builds a nation as an act of self-invention. Jefferson is a Virginian. Hamilton is an American, and if he is “more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground,” as the real Hamilton once wondered about himself, it is because he needs the union so badly. So when Lafayette and Hamilton high-five over the slogan “Immigrants, we get the job done,” it’s an exaggeration (Hamilton had merely moved from one New World British colony to another, and Lafayette was always headed back to France). But it’s also a meritocratic vision of citizenship: Hamilton earns his through talent and hard work, Lafayette by putting his resources, along with his life, on the line for the country.
The show’s casting is a version of these same politics. Casting nonwhite people as the founding fathers is an audacious gambit that puts racially marginalized people at the center of America’s story, forcibly claiming the country’s principle and promise as their inheritance. But it’s also, according to Miranda’s book, roles going to those most capable of performing them: diversity and meritocracy have the same ends.
You can imagine a version of “Hamilton” that uses its casting as a way to highlight the contradictions and tensions between the country’s stated principles and the way they were practiced. But the musical chooses, instead, to mostly try to reconcile them.
A necessary side effect of the musical’s central gimmick is that it necessarily obliterates the actual Black people of the era: Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s slave, is the only Black person named, relegated to an aside.
The surviving references to slavery in “Hamilton” are essentially abstractions. The brutality of the slave trade that Hamilton witnesses in his childhood is mentioned in the litany of misery that drives him to leave the Caribbean. He later calls himself and his friends “manumission abolitionists,” a coinage that follows Chernow in his tendency to take the most generous possible view of Hamilton’s antislavery credentials and enlightened bona fides more generally; the real Hamilton slung nativist attacks at his enemies and took a restrictive posture on immigration later in life.
“Hamilton” performs a political high-wire act. Hamilton’s friend John Laurens says, “we’ll never be truly free / until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me,” invoking this as a reason to fight beyond the Revolution; later, Hamilton says, “If we try to fight in every revolution in the world, we never stop,” as a reason not to.
As dubious as I sometimes found all of this racial and rhetorical gamesmanship, the musical’s popularity is a testament to its effectiveness: It gives permission to its audience, liberals in particular, to love America and root for those who founded it, untempered by the usual ambivalence. “Hamilton” was a victory party — we were living in a perfected version of the world it imagined. And who could doubt it? It was such a huge hit.
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Barack Obama began his 2008 election night victory speech with a rhetorical flourish that cast himself as an heir to the Revolution: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he said, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” That Mr. Obama consistently laid claim to the dreams of the founders, despite the fact that they would have considered a Black president an unimaginable anathema, is part of the core philosophy that made him an appealing presidential candidate. Mr. Obama’s favorite way of resolving the resulting tension was to borrow the “more perfect Union” of the Constitution’s preamble.
The Hamilton consensus conceives of America as a principle and a process. It turns each successive generation of Americans into co-founders who translate and contemporize its timeless principles. It’s a myth that reconciles the country’s contradictions and simplifies our history into a fable.
One of the narratives of the consensus is that equality is an egalitarian ethic that does not require the elimination of class. Miranda’s Hamilton, like the real one, seeks to “rise above” his station, not abolish stations. In his America, the talented and virtuous “command the tribute due to their merit,” as he wrote in The Federalist 36.
Americans see the government as the groundskeeper for the meritocratic playing field. Mr. Obama captured it well in a prescient 2013 speech: “Now, the premise that we’re all created equal is the opening line in the American story. And while we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity — the idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege; it depends on effort and merit. And with every chapter we’ve added to that story, we’ve worked hard to put those words into practice.”
The reason the Hamilton consensus may have fallen apart might simply be that we’re producing fewer Hamiltons. The class mobility of “rags to riches” stories has always been more common in fiction than in reality. But now income mobility, its more modest cousin, is growing rarer, too.
The end of the Civil War initiated a century of explosive and transformative economic growth. That growth has been decelerating since the 1970s, however, and its diminishing rewards are distributed unequally. Earning more than your parents was once a given in America, but by 2016, it had turned into a coin flip. And the lower your family’s station, the less likely you are to win that toss.
Politicians and commentators tend to refer to this as the fading of the American dream, but I think ordinary Americans see it as something more fundamental. Nobody is owed a dream. The loss of this promise is a breach of contract, the theft of an inheritance. And now Americans are looking for the thieves.
So the whole concept of meritocracy has come under attack from all quarters: on the grounds that the institutions that define merit are not trustworthy and that the elites those institutions produce are morally warped; that merit itself can’t be defined objectively; that the grinder of meritocratic competition is degrading and flattening; that inherited genes, habits, social connections and wealth turn meritocracy into aristocracy anyway; that meritocracy leads to unacceptable levels of inequality.
The relationship between diversity and meritocracy has come under particular scrutiny. Under the Hamilton consensus, programs like D.E.I. and affirmative action are not foes of meritocracy, but rather its servants — intended to correct for biases and inequities that obstruct the proper flow of talent. Progressives have come to regard this approach as insufficient. Instead, identity became a credential of its own, diversity itself an end. The muted response among Democrats to the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action and the institutional rollback of D.E.I. suggests that even liberals may have given up on trying to fix meritocracy.
But the re-evaluation goes deeper: Larger shares of the left and right reject the concept that we can distill a pure American ideal that sheds the culture and inclinations of the founders.
To much of the left, the original sin of slavery is unpardonable, the bloody westward expansion an indelible stain. The meritocracy enkindled by the founders may have been a genuine advance over monarchy and aristocracy, but it has inevitably degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy that presides over misconceived institutions. In this view, an America that can trace its genealogy back to the Revolution is doomed — the problems of the country are so fundamental that fixing them might require a second founding. This view on the left has no adherents among national Democratic politicians, but it does have influence in the tide pools that culture them.
To the right, America’s laws and institutions can function only in a country largely dominated by people who are similar to the founders, or at least can perform a reasonable impression of them.
Unlike the left’s critique, this view has real institutional power. Vice President-elect JD Vance gave a recent rendition at the Republican National Convention. After name-checking the country’s founding principles and documents, he ranked them as secondary. “But America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
He illustrated this concept by citing his funeral plot in a cemetery in which five generations of his forebears were buried. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic pointed out, this formulation necessarily creates a tiered claim to America: If America is more than a creed, then some citizens are more American than others.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the belief that Mr. Trump couldn’t possibly win was partly rooted in the idea that this brand of nostalgia was doomed by demographics. After all, how many people whose American roots don’t go back that far would vote for themselves to be classified as second-class citizens? But Mr. Trump’s evolving coalition shows that nonwhite voters don’t necessarily see it that way.
It’s easy to assume that the victory won by this revanchist movement will be a durable one. But as the recent intramural debate over H1-B visas demonstrated, this formulation of America has instabilities of its own.
The country has seen critical challenges to the national identity before and has found a way to reconstitute itself. But those terrible forges of American identity, war and the frontier, have been decommissioned. Today our wars are undeclared and ignoble, increasingly fought by mercenaries; our final frontier is the province of specialists and robots.
And the lack of social mobility that may have unraveled us might make it harder to sew ourselves back together. When previous generations compared themselves with their parents or even their own pasts, they saw life getting better. That may have made it easier for them to tolerate difference and inequity. Today, we have never been so diverse; we have rarely been so unequal. Those generations also did not have to contend with our atomized social landscape, where we are increasingly solitary and social trust is dissolving in the acid bath of social media and the internet. So while I’m not hopeless, I can’t say I’m optimistic either.
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Like us, the characters in “Hamilton” have a penchant for self-mythologizing. They imagine themselves as part of a vast story.
Mr. Miranda says that one of the lessons of his musical is that history is different depending upon who is telling it or remembering it, but his characters don’t look at it that way. “History will prove him wrong,” one says. “History obliterates,” another says. “History has its eyes on you,” they repeat to each other. Today’s liberals often worry about being “on the right side of history,” which is a kind of moral and teleological replacement for the judgment of God.
This is why I think many people have been even more stunned and demoralized by the 2024 election than by the 2016 election — it seemed that the judgment of history had been rendered. Then it was overturned, by surprise, on appeal. But if history is a god, it’s one we mold in our own image.
Before “Hamilton” begins, there is no curtain; the stage is fully open to its audience. And the set feels provisional, in progress: unvarnished wood and exposed brick, hanging buckets and coils of rope. It’s a beautiful piece of craft and a reminder that whatever America is, it’s ours, and what we make of it is ours, too.
The post On Its 10th Anniversary, ‘Hamilton’ Looks Heartbreakingly Different appeared first on New York Times.
