"What's Your Name, Man?"

I have recently been listening with enormous pleasure to the soundtrack from "Hamilton: An American Musical." I know I'm coming late to the party, but this one is going to be with us for a while--folks in Boston are scheming to get tickets for the traveling show a YEAR or TWO from now--so I think there's still time to get down with it. And it's easy to like. The lyrics, especially the rap ones, are brilliant and irresistible, the sing-through format has unstoppable energy, and the actual story--Hamilton's improbable and tumultuous life--contains the elements of great drama: war and politics, romance and tragedy, larger-than-life characters straight out of history but personalized by the show's pop idioms. Great stuff!

And what a story the work itself is: Lin-Manuel Miranda, 1st generation American, picks up Ron Chernow's doorstop biography of Hamilton by accident, sees immediately not just the dramatic possibilities but the connections to his own Caribbean-American background. Obama feels similar affinities and helps launch the project at a White House soirée. Soon the whole world is rapping about the "ten dollar founding father with no father/Got a lot farther by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter," and the rest is, as they say, history. Miranda's work is even keeping Hamilton on that ten-dollar bill where he belongs.

Like most miraculous birth narratives, though, this one leaves out the more questionable truths in favor of the glorious ones. Yes, Miranda deserves his genius grant, and I can hear in one run-through why the show is winning all those emmys, grammies, or whatever. But the fact is, "Hamilton" is just the culmination of a 20-year neo-conservative campaign to reshape our national story around the unlikely figure of Alexander Hamilton, who was an under-appreciated Founding Father for a reason.

The re-invention of Hamilton actually starts, as far as I can tell, with reactionary icons William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, and publishing a seminal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 1997. Chernow's very accessible biography--called a 'hagiography' by professional scholars--comes along a few years later, just as the New York Historical Society relaunches itself with a blockbuster Hamilton exhibit in 2004. That exhibit, underwritten by the Society's ultra-wealthy supporters at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, attracts big crowds but also a fair bit of controversy from scholars, who resent the obvious right-wing bias of curator and Hamilton biographer Richard Brookhiser, in whose vision Hamilton becomes the patron saint of modern global capital, as well as the exemplary case of meritocratic individualism.

On this platform, Miranda's spirited work adds a captivating aura of romance to a figure who otherwise lingers in the shadow of his once-admired adversary, Thomas Jefferson--and in the shadow of his violent death at the hands of the ineffable Aaron Burr. Miranda's musical manages to humanize Burr while caricaturing Jefferson, a two-fer that clears the way for Hamilton to join Washington at the apex of our national pantheon.

Revision also means exclusion. We see Hamilton's undisputed heroism at Yorktown, but not his scorched-earth suppression of revolt in western Pennsylvania, the only Secretary of the Treasury who ever led an army into the field against tax evaders. We hear a lot about his immigrant status, but not so much about his anti-immigrant politics. And the breezy evocation of his epochal dispute with Jefferson--industry vs. agriculture, capital and trade vs. homesteading and slavery--disguises Hamilton's strong beliefs in inequality and his support for a financial elite. We hear the farewell address he wrote for Washington but not his famous 6-hour speech to the Constitutional Convention on behalf of monarchy.

In short the astonishing success of "Hamilton" is not just artistic but political. As I pursue my researches I hope to return to this compelling question: why? Why is Hamilton such a ready-made fit for this America, right now? The answers will I hope prove enlightening.

New World Rising

A few days ago I posted about the decline of left parties in France and Europe generally, along with the rise of myopic right-wing nationalisms both there and here. I want to follow up by signaling this valuable article by British left-wing activist and journalist Neal Lawson, who looks at the decline of social democracy all over Europe but then offers a much more detailed vision of how a new progressive phoenix might arise from those ashes. Some key ingredients:

• Lawson first of all embraces the new post-modern realities, including what he calls "new solidarities in a digital world," such as: cooperatives, the sharing economy, on-line activism and newly networked political parties; shared work and reduced working hours, basic income guarantees; and radically participatory decision-making;
• he rejects 'growth,' i.e. ever-expanding consumption, in favor of a new roster of social 'goods': leisure time, public space, a cleaner, carbon-reduced environment, workplace democracy, and guaranteed necessities such as basic income, health care, and housing;
• he imagines progressive governance not as the domain of a social democratic party in power, but rather an alliance of parties, movements, social change organizations, a new form of power-sharing facilitated by internet connections.

In short, rather than working through Labour or various Socialist parties or even the Sanders/Warren wing of our Democratic party, Lawson imagines a new and more radically democratic 'golden age.' That new political formation will make use of the new technologies and networks to build new forms of social solidarity more flexible and far-reaching than the older party-driven politics. And he imagines new social forms based on sustainability (he says "de-growth, not green-washed growth" but I would argue that authentic green growth, within limits is possible and indeed, essential), a reinvented workplace, and a renewed public sphere.

We are already seeing elements of this vision, often framed as private entrepreneurialism (the so-called 'gig economy') with its flexibilities and libertarian styles of governance or regulation. And we see that in that form it greatly accelerates social inequalities while seeming to enhance 'personal choice.' Lawson want to socialize the best parts of that vision, and tie them to social movements that are egalitarian, democratic, and grounded in solidarity. Though Lawson doesn't mention them, I would argue that the Occupy movement, the Indignados, and Nuit Debout are precocious versions of the solidarities he is calling for.  It's an epochal vision, and a discussion we should all be having.

Vive ... What, Exactly?

American observers have often looked at France, particularly its leftist legacy, with an eye roll, as if this venerable republican tradition, which gave us, inter alia, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were the work of a precocious but unruly adolescent. Now it's eye roll time again, as on Thursday a Socialist Party insurgency fell just two votes short of passing a no confidence motion that would have brought down its own Socialist government. Even the French were surprised: "That's something unbelievable," sputtered centrist scholar Gérard Grunberg. "We've never seen that before."

But bemused incredulity is not an adequate response to this byzantine event. At issue is France's proposed labor reform law, which is intended to lower rampant unemployment by offering employers greater flexibility: hiring and firing, work hours, overtime pay, many of the highly structured worker protections in France would be relaxed. In itself the law is perhaps not the bogey man it has been made out to be: French unions would still wield real bargaining power, and many protections would remain. But the precedent that a Socialist government with a substantial majority would promote a rollback of workers' rights is for many on the Left--including 56 Socialist deputies--a red line that must be defended with protest marches, the Nuit Debout occupation of many public spaces, and now perhaps the demise through schism of the Socialist Party François Mitterand brought to national power 35 years ago.

But is this just France's problem, which we can dispatch with a wink? No, I would say, it is rather the most advanced and articulate version of a struggle that is happening all over the developed world. In America we have Donald Trump making ridiculous promises to launch a global trade war that will 'make America great again.' And we have Bernie Sanders earnestly gathering support, especially among the young, for a 'revolution' that will lead us out of the impasse keenly felt by our most promising young people. In France, but also in the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and indeed most of Western Europe you find nationalist parties growing rapidly on platforms that are nearly as bigoted and ignorant as Trump's. Free trade agreements that define the 'global economy' are particularly under fire, as are the tax havens and other lucrative perks that make the financial sector's domination of the global economy such a repugnant reality. The crisis signaled by these various manifestations of revolt or discontent constitute a civilizational impasse, and France--with its traditions of rational discourse and an articulate left-wing alternative--is merely taking the lead in a debate the rest of us can't obfuscate forever in personality contests and demagogic outbursts.

The crux of the debate--improbably signaled by this rather modest French labor law--is something much bigger than its technical details. What kind of society are we building? Will there be job security? Or a ceaseless shuffle among independent contracts (gigs, to use that offensive buzz term), low-wage service jobs, part-time, short-term expedients, unpaid internships, with a minority of high-paying high-tech jobs for the lucky few? Can these new forms of employment generate mass satisfaction, as the old ones did for a generation? The social unrest that is surfacing everywhere in no-nothing political movements suggests not.

On the other hand, I don't think the French or any of us can hold on to that previous system in a world that really, like it or not, has become globalized. The race to the bottom has already been won--and the working classes in the once-dominant economies have lost. What remains in countries like France, Italy, or the US, is the darwinian struggle to claim one of a diminishing number of winner slots, or accept the second-class status of the hustler ('gig') economy. Not the sort of choice that will fend off the Trump supporters for long.

 One conceivable option is an older-style socialist one: capture some of that excess profit lolling offshore and use it to create a minimum income floor for everyone, to reduce at least the worst forms of poverty and social exclusion. Such a program is finding supporters among conventional liberal theorists, and may appear in Elizabeth Warren's platform in 2020 or 2024. I have my doubts, but I can't say I've looked at it in depth.

The other, less formed but infinitely more promising alternative, is the one I call by its shorthand name: eco-socialism. This points to a new sort of economy, powered by green energy, grounded in local, sustainable production, building social forms around cooperation and solidarity, with localized democratic control. Very scattered forms of this brave new world--co-ops of various sorts, sustainable agriculture, a 'shared' economy--are appearing here and there. It lacks mass support or a global theory, but 'horizontal' experiments in power-sharing such as Occupy Wall Street, Los Indignados, and now Nuit Debout are early rehearsals for such a transformation. Is it feasible? I don't know. But if the alternative is authoritarian retrenchment behind a Marine Le Pen or a Donald Trump, sign me up for a test drive to a different future. Please.

All Power to the Soviets

Even with his convincing victory in Indiana, we have to admit, Bernie has Burned his Bern and Roared his Roar, but no, he's not going to be the Democratic nominee. He is absolutely right, I think, to  stay in through California, to take his issues to the convention, to give his voters, as he says, the chance to show their preference for him. And to point the way to bigger victories to come.

The French protest movement Nuit Debout, which has been equally inspiring in its way (see previous posts), may be reaching its term as well. Alliances with the unions and the immigrant citées have failed to materialize, and though some see the increasing tension and scuffling with police as a next stage, I suspect the creative, open-ended, 'horizontal' phase will be hard to sustain, just as Occupy Wall Street was, after a while. The many voices who say that Occupy was futile, though, are simply wrong: it has borne much fruit in the BlackLivesMatter and $15 wage movements, not to mention the Sanders campaign--and Nuit Debout, which has inspired much poetry, may prove equally consequential in the longer run.

Ours nonetheless remains a time of retrenchment: we Americans will be asked in November to choose between a center-right conservative and a demagogic, racist, misogynist, xenophobic asshole. Most of the European social democracies aren't doing much better. Syriza seems trapped in a blind alley, Podemos hasn't made the leap to governance, Labour is confronting some ugly skeletons in its closet, and Left parties all over Europe are abandoning their social goals. Politics in the formerly social democracies is increasingly reduced to a contest between upholders of the corporatist status quo, and far-right nationalists. Not a pretty sight.

But we go on because we have no choice. Deep down we know that Big Corporations and Big Finance will drive us over the cliff, promoting ever grosser inequalities on the way  to environmental disaster. There is an emerging eco-socialist alternative, at least in theory and sometimes in local practice. The young people in the place de la République are trying to invent new forms of social organization. So are all those people at Bernie rallies, and in thousands of other movements, projects, and initiatives all over the world. Green energy, local sustainable agriculture, cooperative and shared economic structures--a new world is taking shape here and there. The young get it--they know their futures are at stake. Even in this cold rain there are signs of spring.