Saturday, July 04, 2020

"Hamilton" e as divisões no "progressismo" norte-americano

Isto é de 2016 (pior ainda - acho que é de 2015 mas alterado em 2016), mas se calhar continua atual - como a popularidade do musical "Hamilton" entre os Democratas norte-americanos (ou pelo menos entre a sua elite) pode ser visto como um sinal de se estarem a concentrar apenas em questões como o anti-racismo, deixando de lado a luta de classes económica.

Recorde-se que Hamilton pode ser visto como um dos fundadores da tradição política que veio a dar origem ao Partido Republicano, enquanto o seu adversário Thomas Jefferson de certa forma ser´´a o fundador do Partido Democrático.

How Lin-Manuel Miranda taught liberals to love Alexander Hamilton, por Matthew Yglesias

Miranda's Hamilton so perfectly matches the sensibilities of mainstream Obama-era Democrats that the Democratic National Committee turned an early November Hamilton performance into a fundraiser.

And it reflects an ongoing, albeit somewhat subtle, split among contemporary Democrats. All factions of the current party are supportive of racial justice causes and immigration reform, and all factions are supportive of making rich people pay higher taxes to finance social spending.

But to someone like Bernie Sanders and his supporters, crushing the political power of the rich is the central political cause of our time — the key from which everything else follows. This worldview is incompatible with both the spirit of high-dollar, star-studded fundraising events (which, indeed, Sanders eschews) and with the idea of celebrating Hamilton and the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics. Not coincidentally, it also has a somewhat strained relationship with some of the racial justice and immigrant rights causes ("the billionaires," for example, are clearly not the primary impediment to the policing reforms sought by Black Lives Matter nor to obtaining a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants) that helped inspire the historiographical revisions that are the basis of Miranda's Hamilton.

But Sanders's perspective is currently a minority one in the Democratic Party, and the dominant faction that includes both Clintons and Barack Obama offers a distinctly Hamiltonian look for the original party of Jefferson.

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