فصل 29

XXix

CONTAINING A DIALOGUE ON AMBITION

AND SOME TOPICAL COMMENTS, from DAVID BROOKS & CHRISTOPHER HAYES

It sounds l ike something lin cooked up for dramatic purposes, but it really happened this way.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran for president with Aaron Burr as his de facto running mate. It was “de facto,” because the screwy electoral system of the era didn’t allow candidates to run as a ticket. Jefferson anticipated that he would win the most electoral votes, and Burr would come in second, which would make them president and vice president, respectively. Instead, the two men tied, and Burr, discovering that he’d like to be president after all, declined to step aside. The Federalists who controlled the House of Representatives now got to pick the winner. Just as Lin dramatizes, they sought Hamilton’s advice about which man to elevate: Jefferson, whom Hamilton had called “an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics,” or Burr, the embodiment of “a daring and unprincipled ambition”?

“Politically, if I were Hamilton, and I have a choice between a guy who doesn’t really believe anything and a guy who believes the opposite of what I believe, the smart thing is to go with the guy who doesn’t believe anything,” says David Brooks, the best-selling author and New York Times columnist. “You can talk to that guy. You can work him over,” agrees Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes.

“It’s not going to be that bad,” says Brooks, and they both laugh.

Hayes is among the country’s leading liberals and Brooks is among its leading conservatives: Both of them have a special relationship to Hamilton. Brooks had seen an early performance at the Public, and written a glowing column that lifted the show off the arts pages and into the political conversation. Hayes has known Lin since they were teenagers, when they did plays together at Hunter College High School. (Hayes remembers Lin as “just this classic fricking generative compulsive genius who makes stuff, presents it to the world, makes more stuff, and is constantly full of schemes and projects.” They are good friends.)

“But, of course, Hamilton was not just a political officeholder,” continues Brooks. “He was a believer in virtue. He had an ethical system.”

“I find that really resonates for me,” says Hayes. “My grandfather was a right-wing conservative Catholic, someone who went to Mass every day, and hated, hated communism. But I still feel like I’m his inheritor, because he really believed in something. As a reporter I often feel closer to people who feel strongly about things on the opposite side from me than people who don’t care. So that section of the show is super-believable. I would have voted for Jefferson.”

I had invited Hayes and Brooks to see Hamilton again during its Broadway previews, then share a dinner, in hopes that they could unravel a mystery. In 1800, enough politicians took their cues from Alexander Hamilton that he might have swayed the outcome of a presidential election. But look around Capitol Hill today: Where are the Hamilton devotees in government now?

“My view is that Hamiltonians existed until Teddy Roosevelt,” says Brooks. “Hamilton used limited but energetic government to create mobility, but after Roosevelt, the debate became big government versus small government, so the Hamilton tradition got caught cross-ways.”

Neither party has room for him now, Brooks believes. Republicans have become allergic to government, and can’t see what Hamilton saw: that government can let more people into the system, and help capitalism solve the structural problems it is facing. But Democrats balk at embracing somebody whose programs would create more opportunity for gifted upstarts at the expense of creating more misery for the people who can’t excel.

“Hamilton said that if we have to make life harder for people who can’t hack it, we’re going to do that,” says Brooks. “The goal is greatness.”

“The goal is greatness, but he says that as someone who is a world-historical genius,” says Hayes. “I have a certain deep affection for the brilliant outer-borough striver, but I also recognize the limitations of that structure. My visceral emotional reaction is in favor of that system, but my intellectual bearings are that that’s not a way to run a society.” “I would have thought it’s the other way around,” I say. “Your head would say, Strive, that’s how you get greatness,’ and your heart would say, But a lot of people will be left behind.’” “My heart is with the outer-borough strivers because that’s the world I lived in, and so did Lin,” says Hayes. “He is from Inwood. I am from the Bronx. We bonded over two things: We both loved theater, and we took the express bus together. We were both sort of outsiders. Everything about that play we just saw is about an outer-borough striver, and I get it in my goddamn blood cells. When I saw it for the first time, I told him, You have managed to channel something in history that is our shared experience of this world, where we were getting on that bus every day, and we put our armor on, and said we’re gonna slay.’ I didn’t think of it in those terms then. I thought of it as going to Manhattan and being very lucky. But that metabolism as an outer-borough striver is so central to who I am, and who Lin is, and how we grew up. And that play is a masterpiece of its expression.”

“That resonates for me,” says Brooks. “I was raised by my grandfather, who grew up on the Lower East Side, and then in the Bronx. His father came from Russia. He would say, You want to make it in the city.’ That meant Manhattan–Midtown, the Upper East Side. In college, I had pictures of Madison Avenue in my dorm room. Now it seems pathetic, but that was the dream, that was Mecca– to make it in the city.”

The real conflict in Hamilton, Brooks and Hayes agree, lies deeper than political disputes of the past or present. “More than anything, the show is about Hamilton and Burr, and their styles of ambition,” says Hayes. “How do you get to the top, and what’s the most American way to do that?”

“Are you the operator or the crusader?” asks Brooks. “Every single person walks out of the theater thinking about Hamilton and saying, I want to have that kind of ambition.’” “Right,” says Hayes. “Which is sort of deeply American. And that’s why the show is universal. Because everyone wonders, Are my dreams big enough? Am I really making the most out of my life?”