Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular rap musical, Hamilton, is streaming on Disney+ in honor of Independence Day.
But Hamilton could be canceled by the “social-justice mob,” writes Kay S. Hymowitz. It’s too “unabashedly patriotic,” too upbeat about social mobility.
Hamilton is the beloved masterpiece of the diversity revolution, an ode to the country’s multiracial future and to “immigrants [who] get the job done!” Its cast was almost entirely nonwhite, with one notable exception: a campy, mincing King George III. Miranda himself, son of Puerto Rican parents, played the musical’s namesake hero, Alexander Hamilton. Audiences were swept up in the mischievous chutzpah of casting black actors as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the clever rap couplets evoking the thrill of youthful revolution.
. . . Such is the madness of this Jacobin moment that a 2015 progressive musical now looks quaint—even problematic.
And those hard-working, self-starting immigrants? Not in 2020, writes Hymowitz. “Every red-blooded progressive knows that the American dream of upward mobility is a myth, designed to blame the poor for their own sorry condition.”