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Of the first Frozen movie, I probably wrote half a dozen articles. What was that magic ingredient that made it a plus-billion-dollar blockbuster, a culture-rocking achievement, a life-defining event for a whole generation of kids and their parents?
That’s a huge question. You can list every ingredient you want: the amazing characters, the charmed music, great story, beautiful animation, the right combination of drama plus bad guys plus humor. It’s impossible to identify a single element responsible for the greatness; somehow it all came together.
We all have a favorite thing about Frozen. For me it was the portrayal of bourgeois life in some uncertain Nordic country in some uncertain past, featuring normal merchants and regular people struggling to achieve peace and prosperity, plus the sad but ultimately triumphant story of estranged sisters who lived a once-lonely life in a castle but discovered together that love is a force that can heal the land. There was, of course, the epic emancipatory anthem of “Let It Go” complete with the magical construction of a glorious ice cathedral to individualism in the sky.
Unforgettable.
No sequel could possibly live up to the first, of that we can be certain. This is why so many of us had a slight sense of dread about Frozen II. We want to know more about this wonderful land and these people but are the producers up to the task? Would the creators find the reasons for the mighty achievement of the first and then reproduce them with an extended storyline that does no injury to the original ethos?
Olaf’s Frozen Adventure from 2017 (it’s only 20 minutes long) provided a reason for hope: it was an absolutely delightful story that captured many elements of the original that I liked. Or would Frozen II miss the reasons for the creative success of the first and instead default to a formula that draws mainly on the capital built up from the first effort to push some manipulative agenda?
I’ve spoken to many people who left the theater very happy with the movie. That’s good. Some people are screaming with delight. I wish I had been among them. But apparently, I’m the outlier here. The movie drew in $100 million on its opening weekend and the fan reviews are solid.
True, the animation is beyond-belief beautiful. Just remarkable. The clothing was spectacular, a dress designer’s dream come true. The music falls far short of the first but maybe that too is to be expected. At least three songs in the film attempt to capture the magic of Let It Go, but none come close. Still, “Show Yourself” is a powerful song.
My issues are as follows. I saw very little of the themes in the first that thrilled me so much. Instead, about halfway through, I suddenly felt browbeat by a pushy political agenda involving some of the most annoying features of contemporary high-brow debate, involving identitarianism, social justice, colonialism, industrial exploitation, race and ethnicity, environmental destruction, climate change, and group-based guilt and contrition.
All this was poured into a confused plot involving dark secrets of the family history, including a strained attempt to reframe Elsa and Anna as the product of a mixed-race/ethnicity marriage, and therefore tasked with righting historical wrongs even at the risk of destroying the town they are sworn to protect.
You can render this how you want. Maybe it is about, as one Twitter account said, “In order for us to save something, we need to sacrifice something. That is what we should do in our life. In order to save ourselves, sometimes we need to sacrifice things that are destroying us, relationships, friendships, efforts, money and more.” Great: if this is the takeaway, I have the sense that the creators will have missed their mark.
Again, for all the viewers who can look past all of this and just enjoy the movie, that’s fabulous. Once I saw the underlying ideological agenda – and fortunately, no younger viewer will see a bit of this in the film – I couldn’t unsee it.
I can’t shake the sense that the entire plot was crafted to address the original’s most fanatical critics on the left, who of course are not satisfied because they will never finally be satisfied. The New York Times even took after the sisters themselves: “the harmonious emotions and good intentions never fully atone for the conventionalism of the blond-on-blond character design, the tiny waists, pert breasts, jeweled eyes and pale plastic-y skin. Hearing women sing of freedom is irresistible, but Disney needs to take its old-fashioned ideal of female beauty and just, well, let it go.”
Catch the language of sin and atonement here? The critical theory that has dominated elite cultural criticism has become a faith so pervasive that it threatens to blot out the creative imagination that is essential to creative art. Everything, we are told, must conform to a political narrative to impose on the entire bourgeois order a deep sense of guilt for its very existence.
Even the Frozen franchise, one of the most successful in history, must be twisted to make this point or else face a brutal beating at the hands of the cultural elite. The writers and directors were very clearly kowtowing to this fear. Here is a paradigmatic case in which a political ideology gets in the way of producing art that speaks to the real complexities of the human experience and uplifts the spirit.
But here is what is interesting. I’m looking all over the Internet for people who saw what I saw. It’s there but you have to look for it. This lefty site celebrates the film:
[In Frozen II] climate justice moves from allegorical substrate to the centre of the story. Elsa is drawn Into the Unknown (the title of the soundtrack’s first single) by an ethereal voice that speaks for disordered nature…. Elsa’s icy powers may be able to stop elemental forest fire, but it is her determination to learn about and take responsibility for colonial climate crisis, in solidarity with an indigenous community, that we need as the forests of California, where the film was made, burn down.
To which I can only roll my eyes.
National Review too picked up on it:
Sometimes the Left’s enthusiasm for making amends for ancient iniquity looks like random punishment directed at innocent living people. Disney typically contents itself with selling a sort of mushy be-nice liberalism, but Frozen II may presage a turn to storylines that celebrate extremism. Are you ready for Woke Disney?
The great news is that, so far as I can tell, viewers aren’t very interested in the climate-crisis-post-colonial-critical-theory-identitarian elements of the story and prefer to think mainly about the cute fire gekko, Elsa’s taming of the water horse, and Anna’s awesome boots.
All to the good. May the public’s implacable superficiality save us from insufferable wokeness that threatens to ruin all the things we love.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
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What Arthur Burns Broke, Paul Volcker Fixed
Paul Volcker, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, passed away this week at the age of 92. He is widely credited with ushering in a new era in Federal Reserve policy making, where much more attention is given to controlling inflation.
When President Carter appointed Volcker to the Fed, inflation was approaching double digits for the second time in less than a decade. Arthur Burns, who began his tenure as Fed chair in 1970 when inflation was around 4.90 percent, saw inflation rise to 11.51 percent in 1974 Q4, fall to 5.13 percent by 1976 Q4, and begin climbing again thereafter. Inflation rose from around 6.43 to 8.52 percent during G. William Miller’s brief tenure from 1978 to 1979.
Before Volcker, Fed chairs occasionally denied their ability to control inflation. Arthur Burns referred to cost-push inflation (in contrast to the demand-pull inflation caused by faster money growth). “The rules of economics are not working in quite the same way as they used to,” he told Congress in 1971.
There were dissenting views, to be sure. But, for most of the 1970s, they were coming from outside the Fed. Milton Friedman, for example, called Burns out at the December 1971 American Economic Association annual meeting. It was not cost-push inflation, Friedman claimed, but “erratic and destabilizing monetary policy [that] has largely resulted from the acceptance of erroneous economic theories.”
Volker changed that. He acknowledged that the Fed could bring down inflation and then set a course to do just that. Moreover, he did so with great resolve.
Engineering a disinflation is a costly proposition. The central bank must cut the growth rate of money to bring down inflation. However, cutting the growth rate of money also tends to fool producers into thinking there has been a decrease in the relative demand for their products. As a result, they produce fewer goods and services — which often means laying off workers — until they realize the error and adjust their prices down accordingly.
The underproduction problem can be mitigated, to some extent, by credibly announcing the policy in advance. If producers reduce their inflation expectations in line with the policy, they will not be fooled into underproducing.
But that is easier said than done. It is difficult to credibly announce a policy in normal times. Most folks just don’t pay that much attention to — or understand — monetary policy. It is harder still when the central bank has failed to live up to expectations in the past, since even those who do pay attention and understand how monetary policy works are unlikely to believe the Fed will do what it says it will. Hence, even when such measures are called for, cutting the growth rate of money virtually guarantees a recession.
Volcker’s disinflation was no exception. Real GDP growth fell from 6.51 percent in 1979 Q1 to −1.62 percent in 1980 Q3 and remained low through 1983 Q1. Unemployment shot up, from 5.7 percent in 1979 Q2 to 7.7 percent in 1980 Q3; by 1982 Q4, it had reached 10.7 percent. Home builders around the country pleaded for cheap credit by sending two-by-fours to the Marriner Eccles building in D.C.
But Volcker didn’t relent. Inflation came down and stayed down. Indeed, the public came to believe the Fed chair was willing to do whatever it takes to keep inflation low and steady. For every ounce of institutional credibility Burns had lost, Volcker gained a pound.
William J. Luther
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How To Stop the Proliferation of Municipal Bond Issues
It seems rather strange that in a putative democracy a handful of people can legally, if figuratively, reach into the pockets of their neighbors but it happens all the time all across America via municipal bond ballot measures.
The main problem is that the measures “pass” if the majority of those who actually vote are in favor, even if hardly anyone votes. That leads to abuses. We should change the rules and mandate that bond/tax measures must obtain the affirmative approval of over 50 percent of eligible voters, not just those with sufficient incentive, education, and information to vote.
In most areas of our lives, no means no in the sense that no decision defaults to no action. You do not have to actively dislike the advertisement of a stationary bike company to avoid buying one of its products, you can vote “no” by not taking steps to purchase one. Heck, you may even approve of its ad but that does not give the manufacturer the right to drop ship one of its high-tech torture machines to your house and dock your checking account in exchange.
The same goes for physical intimacy. A stranger does not get to lawfully have sex with you because you did not actively swipe left on his or her Tinder profile. And Tinder does not get to establish a Tinder profile for you because you did not explicitly tell it not to. Wells Fargo found that out the hard way (though arguably not hard enough).
The need to obtain explicit consent before taking somebody else’s money (or bodily fluids) is one of the key remaining features of liberty. Without it, life begins to look a lot like slavery or authoritarianism.
But the rules change when the compulsory monopoly we call government makes the rules. The original impetus behind municipal bond measures was the notion that voters need to explicitly accept the tax increases needed to service the bonds. No taxation without representation and all that. When most people voted, and where taxpayers and voters were roughly the same people, bond ballot measures approximated consent. (Why fifty percent is often considered the best threshold is another matter, but I will stipulate it here.)
Statewide bond measures pass about four out of five times. Local ones appear to pass at the same rate, even at the 55 percent threshold established in California. And issuers who fail to gain approval can try again year after year, unlike in corporate proxy resolutions where shareholders are banned from reintroducing resolutions that fail to garner sufficient votes. (The SEC, incidentally, wants to raise those thresholds.)
It is a minor miracle when voters in a town like Monument, Colorado repeatedly put the kibosh on bond measures because the issuer, often a school district, is a concentrated interest with the budget authority to hire consultants who appear to make scientific, objective cases for the “necessity” of the bond. Some of those consultants even conduct market research studies designed to help the issuer use words and arguments most likely to sway voters to click “yes” come election day. Opponents are typically individuals with jobs, families, and lives.
Unlike in the commercial sector, municipal bond issuers do not need to persuade people to their cause, they just need to create enough uncertainty, confusion, or complexity to induce most voters to abstain. While often rational in other contexts, inaction on bond measures often means tax increases because the denominator for passage, regardless of the threshold, is always the number of people who actually voted on the measure rather than the number of registered voters.
Issuers know that and use it to their advantage. A suburb of Sioux Falls, South Dakota recently passed a bond measure 1,085 to 129. That seems like a mandate except 14,700 people were eligible to vote on the measure, which went up for vote on 10 September, a time when most East River South Dakotans are busy settling their kids in school, hanging tree stands, and “gettin’ the beans in” (soybeans of course). In other words, only about 1 in 15 people explicitly approved of the bond measure but the outcome is somehow counted “democratic.” (I don’t live in that town, incidentally, and the measure did not raise taxes but merely did not lower them as a previous bond recently matured.)
Other issuers put their measures up in November but only in odd-numbered years, when voter turnout is even lower than during even-numbered years. Often, public discussion of bond measures is muted because debate might draw out voters, which issuers want to avoid because when turnouts are low measures can be won simply by mobilizing teachers and naive statists.
In response to those obvious problems, some have called for minor reforms, like mandating that all municipal bond measures come up for vote on regular election days in even-numbered years. While that would be an improvement, it misses the main point, that no (action) should always mean no (money or booty). In other words, passage of anything authorizing use of the coercive power of the state to take citizens’ money should require the assent of fifty percent plus of eligible voters, not those who turned out at the polls.
When I proposed this recently at a meeting of the South Dakota chapter of Americans For Prosperity, someone immediately objected “but then no bond measure would ever pass!” “Exactly,” was my response. But of course truly important bond measures would pass, after mature consideration and extensive public debate clarified the issues at stake.
Consider again Monument, which sits on the Front Range betwixt Denver and Colorado Springs. Traditionally, taxes and public spending there were low so it attracted childless singles and older couples. Recently, younger couples with children began moving in because it was relatively cheap and improvements on I-25 promise to reduce commute times to both metropoles. Once ensconced, though, those couples began demanding more and better schools, even though that would mean higher taxes and, ceteris paribus, lower real estate values via what economists call tax capitalization.
I do not live in Monument either and would not presume to tell its residents what type of community they should try to create. But I do believe that a nation that purports to be a democracy should encourage citizens to debate the merits of proposals openly and to have to gain explicit approval for taxes, not a bare majority of a few percent of eligible voters in an inconvenient, secretive ballot. Robust debates could raise awareness of charter schools or maybe signal to parents with young children that they should live elsewhere. Or maybe they would lead to even more financial support for public schools. At the very least, full public discussion might expose the exorbitant fees that many municipalities now pay to consultants and issuers. The point is that to win approval, issuers would have to make a case and not just slide in under the radar.
Yes, voters could turn out to defeat bond measures, as they sometimes do, but the burden of proof should fall on the issuer, especially when public school districts seek funding because they have, with few exceptions, failed to create the type of citizens who vote. NGOs like iCivics are trying to improve civics education but the real problem, especially when it comes to bond and tax issues, is the failure of public schools to teach the basic principles of economics and public finance.
Without that background, most people do not feel comfortable voting on complex bond issues. So, as behavioral finance theory predicts, many abstain and the issuers win.
Robert E. Wright
