You Don’t Hate Lin-Manuel Miranda. You Hate What He Reminds You Of
Lin-Manuel Miranda never stood a chance.
Not because his work was hollow, or his politics weak, or his craft insincere — but because he became useful. And usefulness, in this country, is a dangerous kind of fame.
Back in 2015, when Hamilton exploded, the country was starving for a cultural symbol that made liberal America feel righteous again. Obama was still in office. The idea of “diversity” was something to be Instagrammed, not interrogated. Hamilton felt revolutionary , a Broadway musical with hip-hop, people of color playing Founding Fathers, lyrics dense enough to make history sound like a mixtape.
But what people loved wasn’t the text. It was the gesture.
They loved how it looked. They loved what it said about them to love it. They loved how it made them appear — cosmopolitan, educated, progressive, in touch.
They did not wrestle with the contradiction of Black and brown bodies playing colonial figures as a metaphor for the people who actually built the country. They did not think about how Hamilton is, at its core, a play about assimilation — about a man of humble origins bending himself into the mold of empire, clawing for acceptance in a system that will never truly love him back.
They loved the optics of revolution, not the labor of it.
And now, ten years later, they despise him for the same reason they once adored him — because of vibes. Because of aesthetics. Because Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man, has become shorthand for a moment in liberalism they’d rather forget.
When his voice appeared on the new Mountain Goats album, people acted like it was some betrayal — like just hearing him was enough to contaminate the music. But this backlash isn’t critique. It’s performance. It’s aesthetic neoliberalism, that strange mutation of politics where taste becomes morality, and sincerity becomes sin.
In the world that Tumblr built — the one that trained a generation to equate identity with brand and empathy with optics — liking the “wrong” thing feels dangerous. Art isn’t something to be felt or wrestled with; it’s something to be curated. Every preference is a signal to the tribe.
This is how Tumblr destroyed political imagination: By teaching us that caring was cringe. By making irony the new authenticity. By convincing us that criticism without compassion is the same as intellect.
Under this logic, someone like Miranda — an earnest, nerdy, unguarded artist — is bound to fall. His optimism, once comforting, now reads as naïveté. His sincerity, once refreshing, now feels embarrassing. He is not a man anymore; he is an emblem — a scapegoat for every disappointment of Obama-era liberalism, every hollow victory, every failed promise of representation.
But there’s a cruelty in that scapegoating — especially for marginalized creators. Because what happens to Miranda happens to all of us who try to tell stories within a system that only loves the symbol, not the struggle. Black, brown, queer, immigrant — we get lifted up as signs of progress, and then torn down when the culture decides progress wasn’t enough.
We are praised for existing, then punished for being imperfect.
This is the cycle aesthetic neoliberalism demands: it feeds on sincerity until it can no longer stomach the sight of it. It builds pedestals out of hashtags, then calls you “cringe” for standing on them. And what’s left after the takedown isn’t better art, or deeper thought, or stronger politics — it’s silence. It’s fear. It’s people too afraid to create because they might one day be uncool.
Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t change. America did. Tumblr did. We did.
We traded analysis for aesthetics. We traded empathy for performance. We traded complexity for the safety of the in-joke.
And in doing so, we made it impossible to actually talk about what Hamilton was saying — about race, ambition, belonging, and the violent hunger to be seen as American.
We never wanted to listen. We just wanted to clap for ourselves.
So now, every time someone drags Miranda online, I can’t help but think: you’re not rejecting him. You’re rejecting the reflection he holds up — the version of progressivism that confuses aesthetics for ethics, that thinks performance is praxis, that mistakes embarrassment for evolution.
And that kind of politics doesn’t change the world. It just changes the feed.
