watching a bunch of black people sing and dance while embodying monsters who raped their slaves turns a key in the liberal brain that unlocks pure and total absolution for the viewer's role in the death of the biosphere

don't ask me why I don't make the rules

If the founding fathers are poc, then they aren't problematic :galaxy-brain:

Trump. It didn't really blow up until Trump. It allowed libs to safely indulge in conservative idolatry of the founders because hip PoC rappers told them it was actually dope. They couldn't safely indulge those feelings because Trump made them feel icky about it. So Manuel Miranada Cosgrove sold himself as the guy who would express it for them in a safe cultural padded room where they could be both nationalistic and colonial but also not feel guilty.

because it blackwashes the founding shitheads that they love to idolize

It gets to turn a man who owned slaves and dedicated his life to opposing democracy into an immigrant (they love to call him an immigrant, how progressive of him to move from the British West Indies to a different colony) entrepreneur living the American dream.

they love that they can reclaim the founding fathers from conservatives, pointing out that the feudal lords that founded the country loved civility and norms will totally own the trumpers

Something else that I don't see here is that Hamilton is a woke relitigation of the original settler contradiction between northern industry and finance and Jeffersonian/southern yeomanry/plantations. In order to become a power, the u.s. had to build its settler economy in the vein of old Britain. That meant financing the government at debt to corporate and financial interests. The other option was the idea of small white landowners. Both of these interests needed each other, but the Federalists had to win. That is the Hamiltonian victory: Washington essentially agreed and laid out that course in everything but name. Of course, the political can of not favoring slavery got kicked down the road for almost 100 years. I think that's what libs want. They want to feel woke and good about the clash of genocidal self-interests that started the u.s. and if they tell that story with poc rappers, they can elide the brutal African and Indigenous genocide of it all without claiming those things were good, like neoconfederate southerners.

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The original question that spawned this thread was not “why do libs like a show like that?” It was “why would you create a show like that?” I’m a huge fan of Hamilton (I’ve somehow managed to ignore its horrendous politics) and can answer this question.

Lin Manuel Miranda is a second generation immigrant who spent a month out of every year in Puerto Rico as a child. His parents are both first generation, a psychiatrist and a lawyer who consults for the Democratic Party. So he very much grew up upper middle class in an immigrant household. In parts of the “making of” book for Hamilton, he comments on the conversation Hamilton and Burr have about a street getting renamed after someone. Manuel remarks about how he overheard conversations like this about legacy from his father. This is the world he grew up in. People who knew that history books would contain the names of their families.

So you have a Latino kid who is essentially living the American Dream, but he’s brown and doesn’t see himself reflected in America’s creation myths (weird, that). He reads a biography of founding father Alexander Hamilton (as one does) and this biography happens to paint Hamilton in a very favorable light. So much so that Miranda writes an entire arc about Hamilton’s crusade against slavery that was cut for time but still has some remnants in the show. I think Miranda related to this guy who was kind of in between two worlds and wanted to draw the parallels.

And frankly it was very funny to watch chuds melt down over the show refusing to cast any white people so they made the on white role the most insufferable and incompetent guy in the entire play who gets shot within minutes.

I think it really does say a lot that Lin Manuel got picked up by the Obama administration for that poetry night too. Just in case anyone thought this musical couldn’t get any more lib, here’s a remix of George Washington’s farewell song with his final letter read by Obama

Its that scene from The Simpsons, "We need a symbol to show we're gay and Republican!" and Maggie's pink elephant balloon wafts into the conference room.

Here its a room full of Democrats saying "We need a way to be woke and patriotic!"

Because the world is a cruel and dark place designed by a malicious god to cause pain and confusion

Because it's rap that's not scary. I showed it to my wife a while back because I was trying to find a way to get her to like some hip hop. I guess it worked? She likes Hamilton and I got her to listen to the Fugees.

Honestly cuz Obama.

Thank you all for your answers in this thread. You are helping me make sense of something that has made my eye twitch for six years at least.

Libs love musicals and Hamilton is the most anodyne musical ever imagined

Can't even pull the "Rap music is bad because it's about drugs and hoes" angle on it because it's about the founding fathers

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