THE FACT is, that despite what that moronic rap and boogie musical teaches, Alexander Hamilton was probably the worst of those who gave us the anti-democratic atrocity which is on full display in the de-facto Republican-fascist control of the government nominally in the hands of the Democrats who a large majority of the country want to govern us. The Constitution that, literally, every single thing that is good and decent in the history of the United States has had to struggle against, fight against, shed blood over and even die for. Worse than the frequently awful Madison or the putrid John Jay, worse than the hypocrite Thomas Jefferson who was probably, all of his abominable crimes against Black and Native People of Color, against the Haitian People, etc, was at least not the enemy of democracy in theory. Aaron Burr was hardly a hero but him shooting Hamilton was probably one of the things that prevented the United States from mimicking the worst of European despotism and kept the small flame of equality, and so freedom found in the Declaration of Independence alive. It is a shame it hadn't happened to the little creep a quarter of a century earlier.
This article, The Hamilton Hustle by Matt Stoller, from The Baffler does an excellent job of proving just what a huge and opportunistic lie Hamilton is. If Miranda didn't intend to lie about the guy, he was a huge sucker for the corporate, neo-fascist construction of Hamilton as a hero, as big a one that Democrats and liberals who buy into his Hamilton hustle on Disney and on the stage have been.
What’s strange about all of this praise is how it presumes that Alexander Hamilton was a figure for whom social justice and democracy were key animating traits. Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice, you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton simply didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American “disease.” He fought—with military force—any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it.
To assert Hamilton disliked democracy is not controversial. The great historian Henry Adams described an evening at a New York dinner, when Hamilton replied to democratic sentiment by banging the table and saying, “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!” Hamilton’s recommendation to the Constitutional Convention, for instance, was to have a president for life, and to explicitly make that president not subject to law.
Professional historians generally avoid emphasizing Hamilton’s disdain for the people, at least when they write for the broad public. Better to steer safely clear of the freight train of publicity and money behind the modern Hamilton myth. One exception is amateur historian William Hogeland, who noted in a recent Boston Review essay that Hamilton had strong authoritarian tendencies. Hamilton, he wrote, consistently emphasized “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”
Indeed, most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.
Read the article and see the history of Hamilton's very active subversion of anything like democracy in the early years of the Republic, acting in concert with the top of the then current 1% to take power by appealing to the military to seize power and, when that failed, how he rigged the financial system as the first Treasury Secretary to do a lite version of that in ways that today's oligarchy in concert with Republican-fascists, "moderate" Democrats and the establishment out of places like Harvard, the U of Chicago and Stanford have done. Stoller makes a good case that the rise in white supremacy can also be largely attributed to Miranda's mythical egalitarian.
There should be a commonly known fact of life that when history is told on stage, in a movie, through fiction that easily 99 times out of 100 that the result is either an ideologically constructed lie or it is some idiot creator of show biz or fiction being duped by ideologically motivated liars. Show biz is the WORST WAY TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT REALITY THAT THERE IS. When you have a score and lyrics and choreography you have to go outside of the realm of rational mathematics to estimate the size of the lie thus created and its damage.
It should be needless to say that rational adults should know better but, as can be seen in Matt Stoller's list of Democratic politicians who got sucked into the Hamilton Hustle, not all of whom should have, fiction cannot serve reality in that way. I suspect even the smartest of those, such as Hillary Clinton, are faking their historical erudition as most people do, or they are simply buying the kind of historical erudition that simply reading The Federalist Papers on face value without reading or considering any critical opposing point of view about them, which is one of the greatest problems of a hagiographer's view of history. He rightly ties the show and its promotion to the oligarchy enabling, protecting and financed academic,power and journalistic establishment.
The sad reality is that such show biz has enormous power to both deceive and convince through the use of non-reality and catchy tunes and exciting dance numbers. Even some of Lin Manuel Miranda's critics praise his show in show biz terms. I'm not willing to cut him that slack because the results of such pseudo-historical fiction have been so terrible.
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