66 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICThe school didn’t inform parents of this sudden
end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing
to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children
started arriving home desperate to get to the bath-
room after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents
mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall
door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.
Our son reported that his classmates, without any col-
lective decision, had simply gone back to the old sys-
tem, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using
the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms.
This return to the familiar was what politicians call
a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heart-
breaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge
the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice.
Instead, they found a way around this diffi culty that
the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was
a quiet plea to be left alone.
When parents found out about the elimination of
boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse
at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared
that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman
threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The
parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—
and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying
and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One
called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor
drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal,
who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out
movement than the bathroom issue, explained her
financial constraints and urged the formation of a
parent- teacher committee to resolve the matter. After
six months of stalemate, the Department of Education
intervened: One bathroom would be gender- neutral.IN POLITICS, IDENTITY is an
appeal to authority—the moral authority of the
oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and
makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with
the universal principles of equality, dignity, and free-
dom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often
a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape
and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it
sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited
one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by
the oppression of their group identity. It makes race,
which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an
essence that defi nes individuals regardless of agency
or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna
Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces
that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need
black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-
the- minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century,
with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and dis-
plays of self-mortifi cation. The atmosphere of mental
constriction in progressive milieus, the self- censorship
and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—
these are qualities of an illiberal politics.
I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side
of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud,
because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time
to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further
than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe
democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be
friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.IN 2016 two obsessions claimed our family— Hamilton and the presi-
dential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack
every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its bril-
liant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-
velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic
duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this lat-
est version of the revolution and the early republic. It fi lled their world with
the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more
real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten
at our son’s school, wholly identifi ed with the character of Hamilton—she
fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every
time he died she wept.
Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The fi rst
acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious eff ects, bely-
ing its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and
rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the
American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and
the black Jeff erson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our
daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and
a little dis appointed that they were white. The only president our kids had
known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious
brand of identity politics, which was infl aming the other kinds. We wanted
them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that
belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started
fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the
Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jeff erson’s gloating line
about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”
The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people
close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps
they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right.
Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go
to the bus stop.
The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton.
When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their new-
born children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you,
we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for
me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic.
It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.
A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break
our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversa-
tion about threats to undocumented immi grants. We told her that we were
lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit
down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made
sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III,
the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been
abolished— and they seemed reassured.
Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.
Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt help-
less to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the
Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said WE HAVE