Why the "Hamilton" dust-up matters

To many Americans, myself included, Hamilton audience and cast made themselves look like self-righteous jerks with their display last night. Trump should have let it pass, and allowed the jerks to do further damage to themselves. It would have been the presidential thing to have done. But now he’s ramping it up, and making himself look undignified and beneath the office to which he was elected. I have a sinking feeling this is going to be the pattern for the next four years.

I see lots of people on the left — commenters on this blog, people on Twitter, etc. — getting all indignant, saying that the descent of fascism onto America is such a crisis that we have no reason to respect the ordinary norms of civility. How can you complain about people booing Mike Pence at the theater when the administration in which he will serve is a nest of white nationalists who are going to take everything away from gays and minorities?! Well, assuming that that is true — which I absolutely do not — then you ought to fight even harder to maintain the structures and norms of civil society. One of the blessings of civil society, when it’s working as it should, is the ability of people of different, and sometimes antagonistic, views and backgrounds to gather in the public square as a community.

One reason why the no-platforming, safe-space p.c. craziness on campus is so destructive is that it makes it impossible for a university to do what it’s supposed to do. They treat a space for education as if it were a temple, and attempt to protect it from heretics and heathens. A theater has a different function than a college campus, but when it functions as it is supposed to do, it is a place where all people can come to be entertained, certainly, and, one hopes, raised out of themselves, enlightened, and enlightened together with everyone else in the audience. To make the theater a place where our political opponents cannot come to experience art in community is to place them outside the community. It is to regard the performance on stage as a sacred rite to which unbelievers may not be witness. It is to make a religion of art.