“What’s The Vision”: Fellows Inspired by Hamilton; Richard Brookhiser on the Founders’ Continuing Impact

In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Mickey Lin ’26 and Justin Greenman GSAS reflect on their trip to see Hamilton on Broadway with the Buckley Institute and discuss their thoughts on the Founders:

• Lin: “When I was working on the Hill and I had to give capital tours, I was like, now, looking back, yeah, we never really talked about Hamilton…”
• Greenman: “I think there’s this perception that, oh, we’ve never been more divided. No, we have been extremely divided, right—you think of Hamilton and Burr, you think of Hamilton and Jefferson—it’s a reminder that, right, history maybe—what was the Mark Twain line, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.”
• Lin: “I think it’d be interesting to see a Founding Fathers course or an early American politics course and for first years to take. I think it’s hard to be a political science major and continue to study politics…without having a strong foundation on the Founding Fathers.”
• Greenman: “I’ve found that a lot of people are, if not dismissive of the Founding era ideals, they’re just kind of uninformed.”
• Greenman: “Those ideas, those values, those passions that Mickey talked about, they’re still the foundation of America.”

Richard Brookhiser, noted author and journalist, joined Buckley Fellows at Hamilton then stuck around for dinner to discuss the play and the Founders:

• “The principles under which slavery was finally ended in this country were principles enounced by the founders.”
• “It is a true point that we also have to realize that [the Founders are] not just talking only to each other or in some kind of rarified common room. They are presenting their ideas to the American public. And the American public is reading them, reacting to them, debating them.”
• “Good stories just beat bad ones. They beat dull ones and they beat stupid ones. And a smart story of the American Revolution and of the construction of the government that followed, is a dramatic story; it's an interesting story; it's an intelligent story. There’s a lot of intelligence involved by the actors and you have to bring some intelligence to bear to understand everything that was going on. And it's a story that's not that long ago and still affects us today. How are you gonna beat that?”
• “I remember I was on some panel in New York, at the New School, and this older man came up to me and said, ‘Are you still in touch with Bill Buckley?’ (who’d retired by then), and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Well can you thank him for me? I’m a radical but he was the only place where you got to see radicals talking at length because he’d bring them on to Firing Line and debate them.”

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