The crowd in the know tended to be money people. That made sense. As President George Washington’s treasury secretary, Hamilton turned a new and shaky nation into a good credit bet by getting Congress to fund the Revolutionary War debt—to feed, nurture, grow, and make interest payments on it, that is, and not pay it down too quickly. By getting Congress to assume all of the states’ separate obligations in the aggregate federal debt, Hamilton financialized federalism. He created a national bank, levied federal taxes, conducted bailouts during two financial crises, and tried, less successfully, to get Congress to support a federal industrialization policy. Risky, creative, and controversial, those moves established the economic United States, and to Hamilton, the economic United States was the United States.

People who see the uses of finance as a key driver in history may find Hamilton’s efforts compelling, even epic. But most people, reasonably enough, are never going to get excited about the nuts-and-bolts technicalities of what actually makes the man important. Who would flock to see a show about the ins and outs of getting a bank bill through Congress, or the various tiers of bonds that securitized the national debt? Even historians of the period tend to be more interested in Hamilton’s constitutional writings in The Federalist, which had little impact at the time, than in the rows and columns of numbers that fill his voluminous First Report on the Public Credit, which was crucial to establishing the United States as a going economic concern.

Hamilton was adopted so enthusiastically by our popular and intellectual cultures because the show made him into somebody else.

There were sources for that. Chief among them was Chernow’s narrative, which cast Hamilton as uniquely compelling among the founders on a number of bases, largely invented. Hamilton was indeed a founder born out of wedlock, but that wasn’t uncommon within his social sphere, and he wasn’t even the only founder with such parentage. His hardscrabble coming-of-age also wasn’t unique among the founders, and the squalor and quasi-immigrant remoteness of his background are fabrications: There was nothing squalid about Hamilton’s upbringing; the British Leeward Islands Colony, where he was born, was the throbbing center of Britain’s booming, all-important sugar trade and thus more valuable than revenues from all of the 13 Atlantic colonies put together. Nor was Hamilton a precursor of the American immigrant experience in the sense Chernow intends: On arrival in another British colony, New York, he was as much a citizen of the empire as anyone else there.

Nor did he have to fight to overcome social barriers. Almost instantly, Hamilton was embraced by the most powerful people in the revolutionary elite. And while he opposed slavery, as did many others who, like him, enslaved people, he wasn’t an “uncompromising abolitionist,” as Chernow has it. Hamilton was perfectly willing, like others, to compromise.

But what does a playwright need? The Shakespeare comparison is apt enough here. Miranda wasn’t reading skeptically. Chernow’s book was widely praised and rewarded (the history profession gave it a total pass at the time), and Miranda was inspired by its narrative to see in Hamilton an archetypal American outsider, the diligent talent who reaches the top in spite of vicious prejudice, who “got a lot farther by working a lot harder / by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter.” Reversing the racial composition of the founding-period elite and endowing it with a hip-hop sensibility, Miranda’s reimagining abruptly and drastically expanded that story. As a result, when Alexander the bootstrapping rapper bursts on the scene, combining democracy with meritocracy in an eye-and-ear-popping spectacle, he makes an audacious claim on the nation’s founding. Enacting the transcendence and redemption of a racist national past, he magically makes it anti-racist.

You could say Miranda’s antennae were buzzing. That big act of creative imagination spoke directly to liberals’ aspirational sense of the Obama presidency and its relation to American history. The show had, in a sense, previewed at the White House in 2009, when Miranda performed the opening at an event there, to the Obamas’ visible delight. In 2016, PBS aired a documentary on both Hamilton himself and the impact of Hamilton in which celebrities expressed renewed excitement about the country’s founding history. The climax put Obama in a mutually admiring West Wing conversation with Miranda. That Election Day, with the stunning shock of Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House, the ineluctable connections between the musical’s popularity and the historical meaning of Obama’s presidency vaulted Hamilton the founder to a place in public discourse that he’d never occupied before.

During the first Trump administration, the real Hamilton was obsessively invoked, quoted, and explained everywhere in liberal politics—for example, by David Remnick in The New Yorker, by then-Representative Adam Schiff during the first Trump impeachment, by Representative Jamie Raskin during the January 6 hearings—as a prophetic figure who supposedly possessed a special understanding of the threat Trump posed to the country and offered a guide for upholding and articulating the founding values that Trump was attacking. In 2018, in the form of a new, one-volume history of the United States, These Truths, the historian Jill Lepore presented a fascinating meditation on what she posited as a fundamental conflict between the reasoning and unreasoning impulses in governing America—in a sense, between the Obama mode and the Trump mode. Lepore set up her thesis by quoting Hamilton on the possibility of using “reflection and election,” as opposed to “accident and violence,” in creating the national government. On a more quotidian, day-to-day basis, innumerable articles and online posts had words to the effect of “Hamilton saw Trump coming.” Thanks to the success of the musical and its connection to the Obama moment, Hamilton had quickly become the founding standard-bearer of democratic values, the prescient analyst of encroaching tyranny, and a voice of reason, the rule of law, and the better angels of our nature.

That version of Alexander Hamilton represents a fantastically unfair distortion—unfair to him—of his life, work, and thought. To begin with, if there’s one thing that Hamilton despised, it was democracy in America—“our real Disease,” as he once called it. His entire career was dedicated to suppressing the democratic impulses unleashed by the Revolution and to establishing a national oligarchy.

There’s an impressive cogency to those aims, which goes missing when eyes glaze over in response to his bank, his taxes, and his care and feeding of the national debt. Inspired by the successes of Prime Minister Robert Walpole in the United Kingdom and Finance Minister Jacques Necker in France, Hamilton saw that a modern nation-state can, in the absence of a huge exchequer, grow by leaps and bounds—grow imperially—when it yokes private financial ambitions to public aspirations. The key mechanism was to make a small group of rich families deeply invested in the country’s success—and, not coincidentally, to also make them richer by paying them regular interest on loans to the government, secured by bonds funded by taxes paid by everybody. This brought about the effect that Hamilton devoutly longed for: nationally dynamic wealth concentration.

Making that idea work in the United States took a special degree of financial and political creativity, thanks to the states’ commitments to their own sovereignty, a concept that included an exclusive power to tax. States’-rights elites saw in Hamilton’s national aims, which were invested in federal government power, a reversion to monarchism. (Even his friend and fellow Federalist Gouverneur Morris thought Hamilton “was on Principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical Government.”)

At the same time, Hamilton faced an enemy he considered far more dangerous than the sometimes wishy-washy states’-rights members of his own social class. In the Atlantic colonies, an assertive popular movement of free working people, who lacked access to government power because voting then required significant property holdings, had been pushing for generations for radically democratic approaches to public and private finance. Amid the victory of American independence, ordinary people saw, for the first time, a chance to gain a role in politics and pass laws restraining monopolies, outlawing predatory lending, publicly supporting small farms and businesses—and, crucially, ending taxes on the working-class majority earmarked for paying high interest to a cadre of rich investors in the war debt. Like Hamilton, the popular movement saw history as driven by finance policy.

That’s why Hamilton hated democracy. He wanted to achieve imperial aims by concentrating the country’s wealth in the national government—and by immersing the national government in the country’s wealth. The popular movement worked directly and explicitly against those hopes—and for a while, it looked like the popular movement might be winning.

A realistic view of Hamilton’s determination to defeat elite states’-rights opposition via backroom politics and his bid to crush the movement for democracy via authoritarian crackdowns and federal military force makes his purported commitments to the rule of law and elevating reason over visceral shows of strength look thin at best. The real Hamilton, a compelling antihero, took big risks in crossing legal and ethical lines. That’s how he established the economic nation. His story thus exposes contradictions, inherent in the American project, that the public, the media, some of the better-known members of the American-history profession, and the long-standing narratives of liberal civics generally prefer not to deal with.

It’s not impossible, of course, to agree with Hamilton that any effort to extend participation in politics and leverage government power to foster the aims of the majority is nothing but the bamboozling of a foolish public by a demagogue seeking power. It’s also plausible to agree with him that democracy is indistinguishable from mob rule and leads inexorably to anarchy. Or that a republican form of government probably can’t work but, if it can, needs to build in powerful checks against the representation of the gullible many and protections for the wise and wealthy few. Or that any and all protest against government policy adds up to an attack on government, and the military power of the state should police the social and governmental hierarchies critical to liberty.

Many do agree. Edgelord monarchist and JD Vance mentor Curtis Yarvin may be one of them. But David Remnick, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, and other liberal critics of Trumpism didn’t mean to avow such ideas when they were quoting Hamilton out of context during the first Trump administration. They didn’t know Hamilton. They knew only that he was back, anti-racist and hot as a pistol. They thought quoting him would lend their critique of Trump a persuasive glow of founding-era authority.

It didn’t. As always, they were preaching to a fan base.

High-finance people, for their part, do know something about the Hamilton they admire. They include Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Peter Orszag, and others responsible for the subprime-mortgage efforts of the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Bush tax cuts, and the Obama administration’s banking bailout and foreclosure crisis—all Hamilton-inspired policies that can be seen as paving the way for Trump. While Hamilton remains a more fascinating and unsettling force of American founding energy than most people know or want to know, as a thinker and an actor, he’s got nothing to offer us now.

If the American-history survey were correct, and a Hamilton-versus-Jefferson contest was the defining pattern of our national journey, then Hamilton’s unfitness as the founder to be looking to now would send us running back to Jefferson. That’s how the pendulum has always swung.

But the survey isn’t correct. The Hamilton/Jefferson binary has the virtue of being simple enough to teach and understand; it sounds as if it makes sense. But it doesn’t reflect the realities of our national founding. If we want to find inspiration in the founding period for saving democracy, we might want to start looking elsewhere.

Jefferson did strenuously oppose the Hamiltonian policies of the Washington administration. As authoritarianism ballooned to grotesque degrees during the presidency of a conflicted and flustered John Adams, the Jeffersonian opposition expressed its alignment with the common man and espoused democracy and even populism, favoring rule by the people (which is to say, white male people) against rule by a privileged elite elected by the privileged elite.

In the mind of the Jeffersonian opposition, that common man was a small yeoman freeholder, owning and working his own land, getting ahead enough to prosper through generations. With the aid of vast territorial expansion, which Jefferson would jump-start as president with the Louisiana Purchase, the common man’s reign was destined to spread westward, building what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty.” To the Jeffersonians, the key thing about the yeoman was his independence. In their fantastical projection, he had no demands to make on government—especially the federal government—other than to be left alone. Just repeal all federal taxes, rely solely on tariffs and port fees, pay off the public debt as quickly as possible, and close the national bank as soon as its charter runs out: In Jefferson’s vision, the national economy, left to itself, would come naturally to benefit the mass of ordinary people. Federal legislation seeking to shore up economic democracy wasn’t needed, or even legal.

As president, Jefferson was all over the place and didn’t always abide by those principles. Yet a presumption that Jeffersonian ideas are democratic ideas, and that Jefferson offers the only philosophical alternative to Hamilton, has long prevailed. That’s a function of widespread ignorance of the old popular movement, which Hamilton bent every effort to crush and the Jeffersonians co-opted and erased. Far from being states’-rights or anti-tax zealots, the leaders of that movement demanded fairer federal taxation, very broad national representation, extreme checks on executive and judicial power, and assertive legislation favoring the working class and restraining the power of wealth. Because its base was largely barred from the legitimate political system, the movement was rowdy, spasmodic, and often disorganized; its leaders are largely ignored by history.

But if we want to break the intellectual and spiritual manacles imposed by the Hamilton/Jefferson binary—or at least start triangulating it—we might look to one of the popular movement’s most eloquent leaders: Thomas Paine. His importance to the movement and his opposition to the binary elite are routinely overlooked. In parts of his famous 1776 pamphlet Common Sense—the parts that scandalized John Adams and that almost nobody talks about—Paine presented a model for a hyper-representative national American government totally unlike anything a Hamilton or a Jefferson could have imagined or approved of. In 1776, Paine didn’t just want American independence: He wanted to smash the ancient connection between property rights and voting rights that the other founders held sacred and to unleash the power of the laboring majority. In later works, he laid out a basis for the modern welfare state.

Paine’s populism, at once nuanced and passionate, got him into a lot of trouble with varying constituencies. His life story wouldn’t make for a celebratory Broadway musical—more like a tense national tragicomedy. Nothing about Paine is simple, and 250 years after his own unpredictable appearance on the scene, we find ourselves in greater need than ever of his improvisatory, idiosyncratic, ever-exploratory vision of the untapped potential for democracy in America.