Hamilton and the Left
Consigned to the political wilderness, progressives and left-liberals could do a lot worse than shed their disdain for patriotism.
Anyone wanting to take the pulse of progressive America can consult the opinion pages of the New York Times. That’s where, earlier this year, I found Ezekiel Kweku, one of the paper’s editors, complaining bitterly about Hamilton. A decade after the musical about America’s neglected founding father became a Broadway sensation, Kweku wants his readers to know that it has not aged well. Kweku’s critique repays attention, not only for its revisionist interpretation of a popular piece of political art, but also because it crystallises the dilemma facing the political Left in the (second) age of Trump. Kweku’s polemic is emblematic of the unease—if not outright resentment—with which the Left regards American patriotism. And until it outgrows that defect and embraces national solidarity and pride, the Democratic Party will continue to flail in the political wilderness.
Hamilton is a cultural artefact of the Obama years. In 2008, Barack Obama’s meteoric ascent to the presidency was attended by a groundswell of exuberant national optimism about the world and America’s place in it. If the son of an African father could be elected to the nation’s highest office, who could still gainsay the promise of 1776? And it was from this buoyant atmosphere that Hamilton emerged. Its language and themes were unambiguously liberal, which was typical enough of show business, but it was also unapologetically patriotic, which was decidedly atypical. As such, casting a backward glance at the musical—Kweku recently watched it for the first time in San Francisco—reveals as much about Obama-era liberalism as it does about the founding of the republic.
With Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda told America’s origin story through the experience of the country’s most brilliant founding father. Born in the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton’s life was a marvel of self-creation, the chief consequence of which was the invention of a new kind of nation. After making his way from a flyspeck island in the Caribbean to the Thirteen Colonies, Hamilton enlisted in the Continental Army where he served as General Washington’s adjutant. After the War of Independence, he brought his considerable political wisdom to bear as a chief architect and advocate of the Constitution. Hamilton’s career culminated as a member of President Washington’s cabinet, where his liberal nationalism helped galvanise the dynamism and opportunity that have distinguished American society ever since.
The small but resilient band who remembered Hamilton’s singular contribution to American greatness welcomed a modern retelling of Hamilton’s life on the nation’s biggest stages. (For what it’s worth, I also find Miranda’s musical tendentious and flawed, though for different reasons to those offered by Kweku.) To its credit, the play is untroubled by the detractors who cast its protagonist as an economic royalist and a treacherous monarchist. It is carried along instead by the truth of George Will’s observation that, while Americans love to quote Thomas Jefferson, we live in Hamilton’s country. It was the latter’s ideas and policies that built America’s capitalist economy and the immense national power that flowed from it.
Back in the halcyon days when the Obama White House was staging its own productions of Hamilton, its subject became widely perceived as the beau ideal of the striving immigrant, the shrewd philosopher, and the prudent statesman. Hamilton was not merely a historical icon and a partisan of liberty, he was also the embodiment of the republic’s exceptional virtues—“young, scrappy, and hungry,” according to the lyrics to one of its numbers. He was an American par excellence. He may even have been “more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground,” as the real Hamilton once mused.
Kweku is deeply ambivalent about all this, of course, and he is openly hostile to what he disdainfully calls “the Hamilton consensus.” He invites his readers to imagine a different version of the musical to the one presenting a “perfected version” of American history. Hamilton, he grumbles, “simplifies our history into a fable” and offers little more than a “victory party” for an America conceived as “a principle and a process” in which successive generations are summoned to participate. Instead of highlighting “the contradictions and tensions between the country’s stated principles and the way they were practiced,” the musical tries “to reconcile them.” It fails to reckon with the full horrors of slavery and exaggerates Hamilton’s role in the abolition movement. And so on and so forth...
Kweku’s sweeping indictment sheet naturally includes Barack Obama, a man who, we are reminded, “consistently laid claim to the dreams of the founders despite the fact that they would have considered a black president an unimaginable anathema.” But this familiar griping is beside the point. It was the revolution that the founders led and secured that made such a remarkable historical event possible. The Obama presidency was the result—indirectly but emphatically—of a set of principles and declarations that “the patriots of ’76” (as Lincoln called them) formulated and then burnished into the American creed. The discrepancy between words and deeds is worth recalling, but so is the fact that the words of the founders assumed a life of their own.
Jeffrey Herf
The unalloyed “presentism” in Kweku’s essay is the authentic voice of post-Obama progressivism. Contemporary progressives have little use for the notion that the imperfect founders’ nobility of purpose was required to expunge their young country’s original sin. Progressive masochism is not content with a warts-and-all version of American history, it just wants to dwell on the warts to the exclusion of everything else. But that kind of selective narrative is necessarily full of omissions and half-truths, and it fails to offer a clear or edifying view of history.
On more philosophical matters, the progressive program has little time for Obama’s patriotic liberalism. By Kweku’s lights, “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.” As a summary of the progressive worldview, this can hardly be improved upon. Kweku condemns “those terrible forges of national identity, war and the frontier,” which constitute an “indelible stain” on the national character. Such is the dour program to which progressives have hitched their wagons.
In his superb book Last Best Hope, George Packer observes that the modern Left is split between what he calls “Smart America” and “Just America”—that is, Silicon Valley (before the recent drift rightward) and the urban activist base of the Democratic party, respectively. In Packer’s view, both factions have only a tenuous sense of the nation. At best, patriotism is regarded as “an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time.” At worst, it is seen a baleful ideology that blinds citizens to the fact that “the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled.” Separately and together, these blocs have “lost the capacity and the need for a national identity.”
This disaffection with the nation effectively prevents Democrats from laying claim to Hamilton’s mantle. But the modern Republican Party has also abandoned the Hamiltonian ground. The pre-Trump GOP lost contact with the working-class citizen who longs to make good, and the current iteration of the party has bemoaned America’s stalled social mobility without building an economy to boost it. In addition to demanding restricted immigration—as Hamilton himself did—to shelter the country’s hard-pressed working class, many conservatives have surrendered to a crude and predatory nativism that will do nothing to enhance the power and eminence of the United States.
Contemporary Democrats scorn Hamiltonian principles because they seem to beget a kind of nationalism that is the natural preserve of the Right, and which has now been mobilised by Donald Trump. But breaking that partisan grip—and the tremendous power it confers—demands that the loyal opposition appeal to a nationalism of their own. The progressives in their coalition will howl, but if Democrats would only give Hamilton a chance, they might find an ally they didn’t know they needed.
In this way, the party of Jefferson has an opportunity to turn its electoral fortunes around. But realistically, its mistrust of national power and preoccupation with identitarian grievance makes this unlikely. And if the Democratic Party returns to type—it was founded, after all, by Hamilton’s nemesis—it will leave a gaping void in American politics. On the other hand, at a moment of national division and decline, reviving the Hamiltonian tradition could help to halt America’s downward trajectory, and possibly even reverse it. This is the shortest available path out of the political wilderness, if only Democrats find the sense to take it.
