Hooray "Hamilton"

Broadway’s “Hamilton” was the perfect place for the debate over America’s political divide to erupt. After all, the very subject of the play is politics, and the cast includes many actors who feel especially vulnerable and anxious about the election of Donald J. Trump.

Some members of the public insisted it was inappropriate for vice president-elect Pence to be called out the way he was, believing the theatre ought be a place devoid of such controversy. For these critics, the theatre is for fantasy, a place for escape, not realism; but others believed just as strongly that the national situation is so grave, and the opportunity to register concern so ripe, that the Hamilton cast could hardly be expected to miss the chance to have their say. The very integrity of the play’s theme may have been compromised had the cast remained silent. 

These two postures represent the nexus of an old debate, kept alive mainly by those who are unaware that art has long been at the center of political struggles.  This is why there are such noted works as Picasso’s Guernica, or writings by authors as separated by time and distance as Pushkin and Baldwin, and the music of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. When Steven Van Zandt criticized the “Hamilton” cast for speaking out, he brought back to mind the leading role he played in the “Don’t Play Sun City” movement of artists against apartheid in South Africa.

Predictably, in came Trump on Twitter, like the nation’s admonisher-in-chief, chastising citizens for exercising a treasured right that Americans ostensibly have—the right to free speech. Thus showing his tendency harshly to rebuke and bully anyone with whom he disagrees. In his role as president-elect he now has the capacity to foment the chilling effect well-known in highly regimented nation-states I have visited, with authoritarians at the helm. And this place, my home, could very well lose its bearing and tumble into the same abyss. 

For the first time in my life, I have seen a man come to the presidency without a trace of conventional accountability, who on the day of this writing insists on his right to run his for-profit, transnational enterprise from the Oval Office.

He seems guided only by his own discretion, as legal experts feebly search in vain for constraints that don’t appear to exist in law, because it was never conceived that such a man would ascend to the highest office of the land.

Members of the political party with whom he is loosely affiliated are cowed by his winning without them and sometimes despite their open opposition, and they fear the retribution of his presumed constituency. You can see people from that party who rightly questioned his very fitness for the office now behaving as if they never said a mumbling word. So don’t dare to expect them to lift a finger to reign in his potentially reckless conduct. 

Rather, we must anticipate, and be courageous enough to defend daily what measure of democracy we now enjoy, in order to be absolved of the nation’s egregious error on November 8th. 

Do not be mistaken: The United States of America, which appeared to march away from its dark past of racism and bigotry in recent years, is not immune to authoritarianism, fascism and genocide. There are many citizens of other countries who are willing to bear witness that they thought their societies would never decline into antidemocratic chaos, until they did.