Rewatching Hamilton for the first time in four years, I had a kind of an unexpected revelation: King George is the ideological conscience of the show.

Here's what I mean.

It was clear in 2016 that Hamilton was going to be an instantly dated piece of the Obama era, but it was hard to predict how. If you'd told me Trump was going to win that fall, I'd have guessed four years later its multicultural optimism would stand out most.

But in 2020, what stands out is its reactionarism. For a musical about revolution, it HATES revolutions. Lafayette warns about anarchy. When Jefferson praises the French Revolution by saying "the people are leading," Washington snipes back: "The people are rioting."

Hamilton himself asks in his big opening number:

"And? If we win our independence?
Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?"

He never answers that, but the show does.

Miranda's answer is: Fuck the people! What you need to run a society is great, powerful, moral leaders. Specifically, George Washington--portrayed as somewhere between a saint and a messiah by Christopher Jackson.

You might think that makes Washington the conscience of the show, and he does dispense advice to the main character. But really he's more of living God on stage, complete with an Assumption/apotheosis at the end.

The conscience is the other George.

In every one of his funny little asides, King George has one message (to the same tune): Your leaders might be imperfect, but you're going to miss them in the anarchy when they're gone.

First he's talking about himself. Then he says the same about Washington.

This became crystal clear in the filmed version when he ends up on stage in the demonic melee around the Reynolds Pamphlet. He's gleefully throwing around the papers, as if to say: This is what happens when you try to have real democracy! Everything falls apart! Everyone dies!

It makes sense that this would be one of Miranda's fundamental messages. After all, he decided to do a rap musical about a) a founder and b) Alexander Hamilton, the most undemocratic democrat among them.

It's also what made it the quintessential Obama-era musical.

Obamaism confronted a question: What do you do with a fundamentally unequal imperial power founded on capitalism and white supremacy?

Obamaism's answer was: Keep the imperialism and the capitalism. Add some nonwhite faces to the pantheon of rulers who oversee it.

Obama and Miranda were both saying the same thing as Jonathan Goff's King George:

"Oceans rise. Empires fall. It's much harder when it's all your call ... When your people say they hate you/ Don't come crawling back to me."

Watching that in the midst of the dissolution of civil society under the virus, the tearing down of monuments, and the nationwide mobilization against police brutality is clarifying.

What it clarifies to me is that Obama, Miranda, and "Hamilton" (and Hamilton) were wrong.

The show is shortsighted. Things did not turn out peachy because of the founders in the short run or the long. Revolutions are bloody and chaotic and often end with reactionaries in charge. But stasis also kills. (Just ask the hundreds of people Washington personally enslaved.)

We have our own King George in charge right now -- a corrupt, murderous, kleptocratic tyrant who sings his own atonal version of "You'll be back" daily. We would be much better without him, and the system that made him possible. That is clearer now than it was four years ago.

Though the Hamilton soundtrack is still indisputably a bop. /fin