Blog #4: Hamilton vs Chomsky

            

            I am a lover of musicals. Whether it be “Wicked,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” or “Waitress,” I get sucked into the stories and harmonies of musicals extremely easily. But, like many other people around our age, I am incredibly obsessed Lin Manuel-Miranda’s “Hamilton.” I began listening to it the summer before my senior year of high school, and it managed to stay my most played soundtrack for an entire year. What began purely as an interest in music, my love for “Hamilton” has become something more. I found myself absorbed in the history that the musical revolves around. I still get goose bumps from the brilliantly written, patriotic lyrics and find myself agreeing with Miranda’s views on America’s early history.

            One of my favorite quotes from “Hamilton” is from a number where Alexander Hamilton tries to convince Aaron Burr—once Hamilton’s colleague, but most known as his assassinator—to help him support the U.S. Constitution. When Burr declines, Hamilton replies with: “Burr, we studied and we fought and we killed / For the notion of a nation we now get to build / For once in your life, take a stand with pride.” These lines, among many others, helped me imagine what life during the American Revolution must have been like. I have grown to admire both the historical figure and musical. So—as Hamilton wrote a majority of the Federalist Papers in support of the Constitution—when I read that Noam Chomsky called the Federalist Papers a “kind of propaganda” (2), I couldn’t help but feel a bit of anger. Not only did he contradict what I learned from listening to “Hamilton,” but also what I learned in my high school history classes.

            In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky argues that the United States is far from a true democracy. Although I was never taught that America has achieved being a genuine democracy, I was taught that there are aspects of democracy that our nation adheres to and others that we unfortunately fall short on. But Chomsky only sees how our government fails to be a democratic one, not even acknowledging the positive parts. I find this problematic because he paints accomplishing a true democracy as an impossible fantasy. Although it is difficult to right the wrongs in our government, it is not impossible.

Chomsky points out that James Madison, the main framer of the Constitution, designed the Constitution “so that power rests in the hands of the wealthy,” meaning that building a legitimate democratic government was impossible from the beginning. But Chomsky still commented that Madison believed in democracy as much as “anybody in the world in that day” (1). I can’t agree with Madison being a firm believer in democracy if he didn’t think that power should be granted based on one’s capability and not their social standing. I disagree with Chomsky’s commentary because so many revolutionaries like Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Marquis de Lafayette passionately believed in the most organic form of democracy.

            Although Madison may have structured the Constitution in such an unfair way, Hamilton did not write the Federalist Papers in agreement with the belief that power should lie with the “minority of the opulent,” as Chomsky puts it. I am not knowledgeable enough to say whether or not power is truly given to the opulent, or ostentatiously rich, in our nation and I don’t know if I agree with Chomsky’s arguments in support of this belief. But I know that this isn’t what revolutionaries fought for in late seventeen-hundreds. They fought for the end of slavery, equality for immigrants and women, and the most innocent form of democracy. As Miranda puts it, revolutionaries studied, fought and killed for a “notion.” They didn’t know exactly what they were fighting for, nor did they have anything to guarantee that their ideals would be applied in society, but they needed to be freed from British monarchy. I can’t, or don’t want to, believe that revolutionaries claimed to fight for democracy when they truly wanted a subdued version of it. I find calling the Federalist Papers propaganda offensive to the efforts that many revolutionaries invested in the American Revolutionary War in which they sought after democracy and equality for all.