Earnest Liberalism, Cultural Cringe, and The “Hamilton” Moment
Hamilton: An American Musical might be the last mass cultural object.
The hip-hop kid in me was a sucker for the catchy beats and word play. The earnest liberal in me was validated by the black and brown representation of America’s white, slave-owning founding fathers. Above all, the musical made you feel good about the inheritance of being an American.
But when I just re-watched Hamilton for my other show, Bang-Bang, I was aghast. The cringe was so bad that I wanted to climb under a rock. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but I am profoundly embarrassed by the political culture of 2015-2017 that I swam in. If you haven’t revisited Hamilton in a while—especially if you were a fan when it first dropped—you should check in just to see if it’s as you remember. Because it’s totally freaking not.
This video of Lin-Manuel Miranda shilling for the Hillary Clinton campaign, for example, is at once catchy and the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on behalf of a presidential candidate who was so terrible she made the American people revolt and choose the guy who promised to burn everything down:
“You register to vote and it’s on. Post that Hillary sign up on your lawn.”
“Tim Kaine in the membrane. Tim Kaine in the brain!”
“Hillary makes each decision, lookin’ at the world from a rarefied position.”
Fuck you! Lin-Manuel Miranda is a creative genius with good intentions. But there is no limit to the contempt I feel for an artist who takes Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments” and repackages it to celebrate a warmonger for president.
Miranda hip-hop laundered the atrocities at the heart of American history. Alexander Hamilton was an enemy of the working man, a monarchist, an anti-democratic reactionary…and Lin-Manuel Miranda made us celebrate both him and a revolution of slavers who were rebelling against the British partly because they wanted to takeover the American continent and wipe out the indigenous population while preserving the institution of slavery.
And here’s the thing. Most of us simply didn’t know American history in any serious way at the time Hamilton came out. I guess you can’t fault us for having a glossy, cherrypicked understanding of our past if we literally didn’t know better. But what we’ve all learned over the past decade makes Hamilton age…not well, no matter how much it makes your foot tap.
Erasing crimes and ignominy but calling it idealism or patriotism is itself a crime. Worst of all, it’s a crime that’s impossible to get away with. As we discuss in the episode, the earnest liberals who failed to grapple with how America has related to the world would never see someone like Trump coming until it’s too late. They don’t even have a way to make sense of him. I know because I was one of those earnest liberals, and perhaps you were too. But the shock of Trump helped the scales fall from my eyes, eventually. The price of seeing differently, though, is that I can no longer look upon Hamilton the same way I once did.
If Hamilton was the last mass cultural object, then good riddance to mass culture.
Catch The Bang-Bang Podcast’s exploration of Hamilton with guest comedian Orli Matlow:
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