To be sure, Hamilton’s reframing is not so powerful that it will convince people with conservative political principles that the Framers of the Constitution were liberals. But it doesn’t need to. The relevant question is whether Hamilton can persuade people with liberal politics that the Framers have their backs and to tell the tale accordingly. It can. Partly because the show is so good, and partly because the target audience will be happy to be receptive. Hamilton is beyond compelling as art: people who hear the music once want to hear it again and again and to hum it walking down the street. It will live in the audience’s brain. And American liberals are not going to expend too much effort fighting the revised myth they are being offered. Deep down, most liberals want to claim the mantle of the Founders just as much as most conservatives do. It is nice to have Washington on your side.

The liberal originalism of the future will not rest on one rap opera alone. Cultural change has many inputs. Hamilton plays a role and so do the other things in the environment that made Hamilton possible. The sheer fact of the Obama presidency helps nurture the intuition that nonwhite Americans are full owners of the republic, thus opening a door for Miranda to walk through. Downstream, Hamilton will mix with other influences, some of which it will have directly nurtured and some of which might have arisen independently. The combined effect will be transformative. America is becoming a socially and demographically different country from the one in which the Warren Court and its critics clashed. Miranda is helping that future bring its origin story along with it. And in the field of constitutional law, originalism will keep the present connected to the republic’s Founding by making sure that the Founding adapts.

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Six months after Hamilton opened on Broadway, Justice Scalia died at age 79. In Scalia’s generation, when originalism was mostly a conservative art form, Scalia was the maestro. The struggle over his succession is often described by those who revered him as a struggle to ensure that originalism lives on. But the real problem confronting conservatives is not that a Supreme Court with a Democratic-appointed majority would end the practice of originalism. It is that originalism in liberal hands is likely to produce liberal constitutional law, just as originalism in conservative hands has produced conservative constitutional law.

So the future of constitutional law may now be the resultant vector of two very different pieces of performance art: a hip-hop Broadway musical and a reality-TV presidential campaign that might yet play as either tragedy or farce. After all, liberal readiness to reappropriate the Founding would be of limited consequence in constitutional law so long as the Supreme Court remained solidly conservative. Innovative arguments rarely persuade the High Court that it is bound to make new law in some direction where it is not inclined to go. Innovative arguments matter more when a Court would like to go in some new direction but doubts that the law, properly understood, permits it to do so. It is naïve to think that justices are not animated by their individual viewpoints, but it is flatly wrong to think that they simply do whatever they want, regardless of preexisting legal authority. Justices usually need to feel that the law gives them permission to do what they do; the differences in their worldviews and temperaments show up as different interpretations of what permission the law has given. And it is the function of good constitutional advocates—the lawyers who file briefs and the commentators who shape the broader discourse—to read the authorities in ways that justices who would like to get to a certain result can accept, in good conscience, as giving them permission to do the right thing.