On Its 10th Anniversary, ‘Hamilton’ Looks Heartbreakingly Different

I’m a Black millennial, I write about politics, and I love music. Yet for reasons too complicated to puzzle through, I recently found myself in San Francisco’s Orpheum Theater watching “Hamilton” for what was only the first time. It was an amazing, immersive journey into a past so distant that dramatizing it now requires elaborate stylings and gymnastic lyrics — and not just the era of our nation’s founding, but the Obama era, too.

To a degree that would have been hard to see when the show made its bow, “Hamilton,” now celebrating its 10th anniversary, doesn’t just capture the political sensibility of the era — and a kind of liberal optimism that is today hard to remember; it also contains the contradictions that ended that era. Revisiting it in 2025’s irreconcilably different national climate offers some lessons on how the country could seem to move so far, so fast.

Since at least the Civil War, Alexander Hamilton’s fluctuating reputation has operated as a kind of barometer of American’s faith in its union. When America feels unified in purpose and the economy is humming, Hamilton is a prophet whose economic vision birthed a future global powerhouse. When our outlook turns down, he’s an economic royalist whose policies set the stage for inequality and oligarchy.

If Thomas Jefferson was the founding’s concept artist, Hamilton was its foreman. The founders each envisioned different futures for the country’s political and economic structure. But as Ron Chernow argues in the biography that “Hamilton” is based on, Hamilton got the closest. We live in Hamilton’s vision. And the musical invites you to live in a vision, too: an America whole but unfinished, waves of progress bringing it closer and closer to its founding ideals. It is a meritocracy wrung clean of bias, whose creed is both a promise and invitation to anyone talented and hardworking enough to lay claim to it. Call it the Hamilton consensus. It once seemed ascendant. Why did it fall apart?

“Hamilton” is enthusiastically overstuffed with scraps of history and bits of references. I had encountered Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrical density from his lovely work in “Encanto” and “Moana.” Applied to this classic American story of uplift, the detail venerates the founders by vivifying and humanizing them.

Miranda’s “young, scrappy and hungry” protagonist builds a nation as an act of self-invention. Jefferson is a Virginian. Hamilton is an American, and if he is “more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground,” as the real Hamilton once wondered about himself, it is because he needs the union so badly. So when Lafayette and Hamilton high-five over the slogan “Immigrants, we get the job done,” it’s an exaggeration (Hamilton had merely moved from one New World British colony to another, and Lafayette was always headed back to France). But it’s also a meritocratic vision of citizenship: Hamilton earns his through talent and hard work, Lafayette by putting his resources, along with his life, on the line for the country.