I guess what I think is funny and interesting about Hamilton is that it's very of its moment, in the sense that "Yeah, the founding fathers were glib, shallow satirists, seducers, and murderers—I thought you liked gangstas, bitch!" is not exactly a position anyone is likely to openly espouse today (even though it's awesome). Nor would anyone today be likely to cosign this when it's coming from someone whose credentials to talk street are "upper-class white Puerto Rican guy".
It's kind of awesome that part of this "the founding fathers were just like you, dawg" pitch is that, like, of course Hamilton didn't give that much of a shit about slavery, which in the musical is essentially portrayed as some bullshit omnicause thing you have to pay lip service to occasionally, like unions or trans rights or whatever. Hamilton is portrayed as intellectually impressive only by the deeply cynical metrics of a modern area studies professor—literally productive in terms of page count, widely cited, glib, prone to hysterical outbursts. The rap battle is the perfect format for this vision of intellect as basically a blunt weapon to dress up arbitrary loyalties and cynical power grabs, and with which to punish your personal rivals.
Jefferson's representing the slave power is pretty much laughed off (as it has to be, since Hamilton, and the musical, venerates Washington)—his real crime, in common with the other villainous caricatures in the musical (Samuel Seabury, Charles Lee, and George III) is that he's a faggot. He's simpering, European, aristocratic, and limp-wristed.
The main emotional arc of the musical is Hamilton's fundamentally thuggish and illiberal instincts being tamed into a republican form—being taught by Washington to reconcile himself to the peaceful transfer of power and to relinquish the organic view of the state as a patriarchal family unit ruled by a permanent iron father; learning to enjoy compromise and rule by committee as a way to carve your name into historical memory through the manipulation of rival interests. Appropriately, since his personal monument (those are the terms in which the musical constantly frames it) is the fiscal consolidation of the states into a single federal borrower, the musical is basically the narrative of the forging of an American Bismarck. And it's similarly in love with blood and iron—brawlingly and unapologetically pro-war, with Jefferson's non-participation as combatant being treated as the ultimate proof of his unsuitedness to power.
The Burr—Hamilton rivalry is framed, weirdly, as one of the figuratively "white" Burr (bloodless, cynical, patient, manipulative) and the figuratively "black" Hamilton (hot-tempered, impatient, sincere) clashing over how to pursue their shared project of the aggrandizement of federal power and the forging of the modern state. And then the tragedy is that really, the project of forging the iron fist of the state needs both thug and eunuch, and the eunuch is too proud to understand that and destroys them both.
The homosexuality thing is really pronounced: George III is depicted as a simpering, delusional (white) gay man who is literally raping the American colonies into submission—a metaphor with a lot of echoes in 60s anti-colonial discourse and the more reactionary strains of Black Power.
The whole thing is (1) implicitly accepting the relatively authoritarian form of republican state-building represented by Hamilton as the "progressive" position in the 18th century (not an unambiguously left view) and then (2) saying to an (implicitly black) audience—wouldn't that be awesome? Power, sex, violence, humiliating your enemies through mastery of the committee process. Whitey might be ambivalent and temporizing but he'll come along eventually. Our country needs blood and iron, it needs its Bismarck, it needs to be hammered into a weapon streaked with gore. Would you really give that much of a fuck about slavery or whatever if you were in the ruling class? That's not the issue anymore.
This is the actual emotional pitch for what's mocked as "more women drone operators" "liberalism"—it's our turn to be cruel immortal tyrants now! Cough cough through formally republican means or whatever I guess. And that is an emotional concept which fits very well with the historical figure of Hamilton!
And it's a really good musical. But it's ironically a really good encapsulation of the emotional core of 2014-present progressivism, just couched in terms that would not really be seen as acceptable today. Principally (and this is worth thinking about) I think modern progressives would object to the nominal republicanism and gradualism, which I'd say is arguably its only saving grace ideologically (apart from its general lusty Nietzscheanism (Hitler's Nietzsche, not Nietzsche the liberal individualist) which I can at least admire as an aesthetic ethos).
