Hamilton Broadway Show

The show provoked thought about race, class, and political cowardice – issues still apparent today in our debates. Who should get to be the president? How many has gun violence harmed in its frivolous attempts to prove men’s courage? There’s something for everyone in the story:

Conservatives can revel in Hamilton’s role in creating American capitalism, with its credit system, banking, and stock market (never mind his insistence on checks and balances, including regu-lations, taxation, and the strong federal government that he favored over states’ rights, and his rejection of American exceptionalism); they can cheer on Jefferson as a denouncer of big govern-ment and exponent of individual liberties (never mind his rank dishonesty, lack of scruples, and defense of slave-owning).

Like many musicals before it, Hamilton offers an appealing wish for a mythic idea: in this case, as Hamilton sings toward the end, a vision of America as “a place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints and / rise up.” This still happens, of course, but if Hamilton had been sent here today to attend college as he was some 240 years ago, he’d have accrued a huge burden of student-loan debt and would have been kicked back to the Caribbean as soon as his student visa expired.

The first Republican Presidential debate for the 2016 presidential campaign aired during Hamilton’s opening night, and from then on the show remained tied to the Don-ald Trump/Hillary Clinton presidential election of 2016. Trump was proclaiming he would build a wall and keep immigrants out, while Hillary wanted to naturalize them. “While Bobby Jindal declared that “immigration without assimilation is invasion,” an opening night audience watched a musical about the Founding Fathers that rests on an ideal explicitly stated in the first act: “Immigrants/We get the job done” (James). Miranda adds:

The fights we’re having right now politically are the same fights we’ve been having since six months after we became a country: states’ rights versus national rights, foreign intervention versus how we treat our own people and the rights we have. The original sin of slavery and its repercussions; the original sins of, “Oh shit, we said everyone could have guns and now everyone has guns” — that’s all still here and we’re going to be reckoning with it all as long as we’re a country. It’s MSNBC and Fox News instead of Hamilton and Jefferson, and the polarities have flipped several times, but we’re always going to be having these struggles. We will have periods of anger, and we will have periods of bloodshed, but hopefully we’ll take more steps forward than we take back.