Hamilton Was Never for Everyone

The Musical Myth of Multiculturalism

After last night’s thunderous ovation at the Tony Awards, it’s clear the Broadway faithful are still clapping for a ghost.

The original cast of Hamilton reunited at the Tony Awards last night, delivering highlights from the musical to rapturous applause. For a few minutes, the theater world seemed to forget the reckoning that’s followed this cultural juggernaut since its heyday. The cheers weren’t just for a performance—they were for a feeling. A time when wrapping founding father mythology in hip-hop and melanin felt like revolution. A time when history could be remixed into something inspirational, and nobody asked too many questions.

But questions have come. And what they reveal isn’t the tale of scrappy inclusivity we were sold, but a slick repackaging of aristocracy with a diverse face. Hamilton was never the people's hero, and Hamilton—the musical—was never the people’s revolution.

The real Alexander Hamilton, far from being a symbol of egalitarianism, was an elitist with a deep suspicion of popular democracy. He believed in rule by the “wise and rich,” distrusted state sovereignty, and advocated for a strong central government modeled on the British system—complete with a president-for-life. In the late 1790s, he lent support to the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams, laws that muzzled dissent and imprisoned critics of the federal government. Hamilton wasn’t a people’s champion. He was a technocratic monarchist in revolutionary garb.

Miranda’s Hamilton, however, is presented as a scrappy immigrant rising through talent and grit—a romantic underdog made for the Obama era. His revolutionary fervor is stylized as resistance, his ambition recast as meritocracy. In truth, Hamilton was born into privilege in the Caribbean and went on to champion centralized banking systems, elite military academies, and institutions designed to cement the power of the few.

By casting Black and Latino actors as the white founders—many of whom were slaveowners—Hamilton attempted to reframe America's founding as multicultural at its core. It was a brilliant marketing move, but historically incoherent. It was also risky: the play initially dodged harsh criticism for this race-swapping approach, but as Sasha Stone rightly observed, that strategy eventually backfired. Once the cultural Left moved into its post-2020 puritanical phase, Miranda himself was chastised for not adequately calling out the founders’ racism or explicitly condemning slavery in the show.

As Stone put it, “the woke scolds already canceled Hamilton for not being hard enough on the slavers.” The musical’s failure to address Hamilton’s own entanglements with slavery became impossible to ignore. While he did not own slaves in the same fashion as Jefferson or Washington, there is strong evidence that he bought and sold enslaved people on behalf of his in-laws. For a man so often mythologized as an abolitionist, this history undercuts the sanitized narrative promoted by the musical.

Moreover, the very aesthetic of Hamilton—its polished celebration of "diversity" in casting—became a shield for the Democratic establishment. As Stone recounts, the Clinton campaign rented out the entire Richard Rodgers Theatre in 2016 for a fundraiser. Tickets started at $2,700. This was not a revolution; it was elite consensus dressed in revolutionary drag. And like much of what passed for #Resistance art during the Trump years, Hamilton ultimately served to consolidate, not challenge, establishment power.

Its use of hip-hop and multicultural casting was not an act of rebellion but one of assimilation: a rebranding of the American founding to flatter the sensibilities of urban liberalism. That’s why it thrived in the Obama years, when hope and spectacle were enough. But when the cultural mood shifted—when identity politics demanded not just representation but ideological purification—Hamilton was cast out by the very side it had once served.

This implosion reveals the fundamental contradiction of Hamilton: it tried to make aristocracy cool, centralization funky, and elite consensus racially inclusive. But wrapping imperial ideas in breakbeats and melanin doesn’t make them any less imperial.

What would a truly subversive musical about Hamilton look like? One that grapples with his authoritarian leanings, his disdain for democratic participation, and his role in shaping a republic designed to elevate the few at the expense of the many. One that doesn’t hide behind clever rhymes and casting gimmicks but exposes the deep flaws baked into the American project from the start.

Until then, Hamilton will remain what it always was: a slick performance for the ruling class, starring actors of color but written in the language of empire.

Postscript: Standing Ovation for a Memory

And yet, at the 2025 Tonys, the original cast was greeted like conquering heroes. There was no reckoning, no footnotes—just a roaring crowd desperate to believe in the fantasy again. What they applauded wasn’t historical truth or artistic bravery. They applauded their own nostalgia, their own cultural dominance, their own reflection.

It wasn’t defiance. It was denial—clapping louder in hopes that the dream might still sing.