Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Hamilton (2015) tells the extraordinary story of the ‘bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman’ who became one of the revolutionary heroes who founded a new nation. The ‘Founding Fathers’ comprised the first four presidents of the United States — Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison — plus one or two other luminaries and Miranda's eponymous ‘Founding Father without a father’ himself. Together they kicked out the British, drew up the Constitution and ratified the Declaration of Independence, establishing a new Republican government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.
Two centuries later, however, Margaret Atwood imagines the destruction of America’s democracy in her dystopian speculative fiction The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) —a fictional event that became even more powerfully resonant following the storming of the US Capitol in Washington DC by the angry supporters of the defeated President Trump on 6 January 2021.
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