Macron’s gamble and the myth of the Republican Barrier

By googling a pair of pages in french, my understanding is that Macron wants to beat both Le Pen but also Melenchon.

There is an interesting tension between the (IMO correct) observation that copying the far right will not work in the long term because once its ideas become normalised, voters may as well go for the original instead of the copy, and the (IMO often correct, at least depending on the electoral system) observation that elections are won in the centre. The problem being that the centroid of the electorate shifts around, and in Europe it has shifted to copying the far right.

Not going to defend nominally centre-right politicians here, but to bang my usual drum, in the end the buck stops with the voter. The model of them being a box that does what they should if politicians just pressed the right buttons has serious limitations; they have agency. Voters could reject what amounts to ethnic cleansing of their country from all immigrants, and they could realise that global heating, resource overuse, the lack of affordable housing, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few billionaires are bigger problems than their taxi driver wearing a Sikh turban, trans women going to the loo, or whatever that fifteen minute city nonsense conspiracy is about. Indeed they would, if they were decent and rational people.

And these are the questions that really matter: Why are voters increasingly conspiratorial and far-right? Why do they prioritise politicians who promise to hurt vulnerable minorities and guarantee simple fixes that fall apart after two seconds of thought over politicians who promise to invest in infrastructure and find compromise? Compared to, say, the economic crisis of 1929 or the post-war rubble of late 1945, are things really so terrible right now that an authoritarian strongperson or destroying all established norms are attractive solutions? Here I will circle around to the OP’s observation that what happened 80 years ago doesn’t matter to contemporary voters. Indeed it doesn’t, but the key problem is, we haven’t had experience with seriously bad times for several generations in a row. People think that 2008 was disastrous when the consequence for most of them was “due to changing jobs, I will accumulate less wealth than the boomers did at my age” instead of “my children are starving”, “my son fell at Stalingrad”, or “here, take these 20,000 Reichsmark and buy a loaf of bread, because in a few hours it will cost 40,000”. This has created a deep immaturity, and I fear that things will have to get much worse before voters broadly realise that handing power to a series of narcissistic con artists can have serious adverse consequences.

The point is, as much as I wish politicians would just not ape the far right, I can kind of see why they do. More and more voters want those policies, and the job of the politicians is to get elected. The buck stops with the voters.

More on the irrelevance of 1939-45 history. The most poisonous far-right parties in Europe (Afd and Fidesz) have no neo-fascist history at all. Rather they started out relatively recently as hard neoliberals. Taking the point a bit further, the US Republicans are worse than even AfD and Fidesz, and the UK right (both Tories and Reform) not much better.

Chris Bertram,

There is a big difference, in my view, between rejecting the dogma of the priest and and rejecting the evidence of the climate scientist who accurately predicts global heating, of the economist who accurately predicts the impact of Brexit, or of the doctor who recommends vaccination and masking, especially when rejecting the latter with the argument that virus particles are so small that they pass through the mesh anyway but that oxygen molecules are so large that the mesh restricts breathing. One is indeed reading and thinking for oneself, the other is not only sociopathic overconfidence but also intellectually inconsistent, because by and large these people still tend to respect the expertise of their car mechanic or dentist and expect their own expertise to be respected. I mean, I have relatives who think climate scientists don’t know what they are talking about but express touching faith in engineers’ ability to simply suck all the carbon out of the air when things get really bad. They do not adopt a new epistemological paradigm but merely get selectively belligerent and conspiratorial when they hear something they don’t want to hear.

(Also, I am pretty sure that there was lots of mass murder and violence before the Reformation, ranging from plain old feudal wars of conquest across the Albigensian Crusade and antisemitic pogroms all the way to peasants’ uprisings.)

This is interesting:

Andelman compares Macron’s strategy with Mitterand letting the Communists into his cabinet in 1981 to showcase their incompetence and so eventually defuse the threat:

even if the right manages to win control of Parliament next month, allowing Le Pen’s amanuensis, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, to take over as prime minister (…) it will be a chance to showcase the utter failings of the extreme right.

Looking at the ‘program’ of the RN it might just work:

Their platform is staggering: slash immigration, ban Islamic head coverings in public, dial back renewable energy investment, lower inflation by rebating the VAT tax to consumers, expel foreigners who’ve been unemployed for more than a year, lower the retirement age back to 60, inaugurate a 20 billion euro national health plan, slash the VAT on energy to 5.5% from 20%, build six new nuclear generators and increase the security and justice budget by 1.5 billion euros a year. All this with little sense of how to pay for it.

It’s a huge gamble, but what other choice did Macron have? (Also see the interview with Ockrent/Renzi)

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/12/opinions/france-macron-snap-election-far-right-andelman/index.html

A word from the bond market

France’s debt to GDP has quietly surpassed both Portugal and Spain and is moving towards Italy and Greece territory (as both of those countries continue to improve). Whatever the voters of France decide, the next government is going to be facing higher borrowing costs and the need to constrain finances or further raise taxes to pursue whatever agenda they are seeking.

Hitler and Mussolini didn’t have to contend with bond vigilantes and Bureaucrats in Brussels/Frankfurt curtailing their ambitions – perhaps the existence of these structures, however painful, is at least a copper lining of neo-liberalism.

Far be it from me to say what France should do or how its people should vote (the US elected Trump once and could do it again) but it would be the voters willingness to effectively say the silent part out loud as far as immigrants and Muslims that will decide the outcome and as Chris notes – we’re running out of people who actually remember 1945 rather than having just watched movies about it.

I’m not sure what you mean, Chris. Did Mitterand have to appoint the communists to his cabinet after his big victory or did he do it for tactical reasons, as Andelman suggests?

I don’t know all that much about French political history and was only paraphrasing Andelman, who was referring to the NYT of the time:

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/24/world/4-communist-leaders-join-french-cabinet-after-party-gives-ground-policy-excerpts.html

Got it, thanks.

It is not clear why Alex SL thinks that voting changes policy. Nor is it clear why Alex SL thinks that much money and effort is spent on cultivating myths. Not even the internet and social media is ruled by consumers. Beyond the notorious algorithm, advertising and market competition play an enormous role. If that fails, well, that’s why there are schemes to ban or censor some social media, like Tik Tok.

The Reformation in Europe was very much driven by the question of Church property and the control of preaching. (Plus the church courts’ legal powers over individuals, though that varied widely.) Churches were the internet/social media of the age. I don’t think Chris Bertram meant to endorse state control of that medium in preference to the wicked, the evil and the Satanic, aka “people,” but there is an inadvertent hint.

@Alex SL: “copying the far right will not work in the long term because once its ideas become normalised, voters may as well go for the original instead of the copy”.

Arguably the Danish Social Democrats have successfully applied this exact strategy. Copying – even very explicitly – the xenophobic rhetoric and harsh immigration restriction policies of the far right seems to have deprived the far right of its raison d’être and, notably, voters. The extreme right has been reduced to 10-15% of the vote (from peaking at some 22% in 2015) – while many of their positions have become mainstream with practically all other parties

It doesn’t seem quite right to date religious violence in Europe to the Reformation. First you had the wars to Christianize the kingdoms, then to impose a standardized form of faith on the outliers, then to fight “the infidel” in the Crusades, and finally the Inquisition. Only when uniformity had once again been enforced, and in due course the imposed uniformity failed to hold, did a new enemy present itself.

Worth pointing out that Marine Le Pen‘s party has always done very well in EU elections: 25% in 2014, 23% in 2019, now 31% (another fascist party got additional 5%). Compare that to the national elections: 14% in 2012, 13% in 2017, 19% in 2022.

Let’s hope for the best, but here’s my nightmare scenario if the RN wins enough seats:

France faces a debt crisis a la UK (Truss) cause by uncosted spending

https://www.ft.com/content/b0f2ce3e-e951-4ef4-9325-86b0594e7205

Anti-Islam rhetoric and policies (headscarf ban in public places) create civil war-like atmosphere

https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-headscarf-france-presidential-campaign-elections/

French support for Ukraine will be at risk because parliament withholds funding

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/european-elections-ukraine-war/

Also, one shouldn’t underestimate Le Pen’s ties to Moscow in general.

Trader Joe 12: „the next government is going to be facing higher borrowing costs and the need to constrain finances or further raise taxes to pursue whatever agenda they are seeking.“

This raises the specter of Macron‘s government having to raise taxes on the rich, which unfortunately isn’t popular with voters but maybe less unpopular than Macron’s pet project of raising the retirement age.

@ Alex SL, 21, re cynical strategies
In the Euro elections the Finnish far right lost about half of their previous voters while the mainstream right (who are governing in coalition with the far right) won.
Some far right voters were disillusioned by their party selling out to the woke mainstream and didn’t bother to vote, some realized they can get most of the policies they want by voting for the mainstream right instead of embarrassing weirdos.
The alternative government coalition, a GroKo of mainstream right and SocDems, would not be waging open war on the welfare state and the unions, and that’s all the mainstream right and its donors really care about. Some of the donors will want more immigration, eventually, but they figure they can crush the unions now and switch partners later. The strategy is working, for now, for some people.

MisterMr@27

I meant the sentences to run roughly in chronological order, though different geographical regions encounter the early ones at different times, up to about “impose a standardized form of faith on the outliers.” In France that would be the Albigensian Crusade, viewed as the hinge redirecting the violence of the Crusades inward into Europe, ensuring the uniformity of French Christendom and its direction from the capital and the anointed king. In East-Central Europe it would be the re-conversion of states Christianized by ex-Crusaders in the form of the Teutonic Knights, and the subjection of Orthodox populations on the eastern border by a Catholic state.

There are two views of religious violence in Europe. In one, there’s a universal peace and uniformity imposed by the Catholic Church, with periodic outbreaks of violence caused by delusion or the lust for power. In the other, there’s the unavoidable diversity of belief and social organization, which is periodically demonized and waged war (physical or political) on, with the claim of universal truth serving to help mobilize willing participants in the fight. I wasn’t talking about religious violence in general and was puzzled by your suggestion that religious violence is always instigated by rebels against the status quo.

I’ve recently noticed an uptick especially online in romanticizing the Catholic Church and viewing it as more of a monolith, historically, than it really has been, including among non-Christians. A literalizing and universalizing of scholarship that compares this or that uniformity to an idealized church at some high point in the Middle Ages. To compare pogroms with the Reformation is somewhat odd.

CB @ 30

Fair. I’ve also noticed an uptick in writers suggesting that all the bad things in the modern world started with Luther, and presumably wouldn’t have happened without Luther, which I do find annoying for the reasons mentioned above. I do wonder how long the empire, holy or secular, could have held as the north developed more. It’s not as if Rome had TV and the Internet to help maintain the same ties they could have with closer princes and populations. (Think how much violence could have been avoided if the Pope had just conceded that many of Luther’s accusations were fair, and opened a dialogue!) Possibly any temporary peace the Reformation broke into is more surprising.

@17 MisterMr

I think perhaps you miss my point. You’re quite correct on the economic history of Germany under Hitler. The point however, is that he still pursued all of the policies that he pursued despite deflation, personal bankruptcies etc. At the time, attempting to re-enter the gold standard was viewed as actually quite fiscally responsible – akin to joining the Euro (to use your analogy) but he persisted with policy despite that goal.

By contrast, what France is facing is the widest spread to German borrowing costs since the financial crisis (spread has nearly doubled just this week) the potential for debt downgrade and as their finance minister noted today – potential expulsion from the EU if a left coalition and its irresponsible spending policies prevail (his words, not mine). I’d view this comment as a substantial overstatement, but to the extent people vote with their money – the bond market is not impressed.

Accordingly the EU acts as a check on policy – where Hitler (or Mussolini), quite clearly, was not constrained in any such way.

With respect to the OP – the fact we’re debating this suggests CBs point – what happened in 1935-1945 isn’t much a check on views of today.

The Islam-bashing is breathtaking in its stupidity. They already banned headscarves in schools and public offices. As if that solved any problems… More restrictions would be unconstitutional. The popularity of this nonsense confirms that for large swaths of the electorate, actual public policy of the sort that could make their lives better or worse is utterly irrelevant. Voting for them is about living a fantasy of national purity. How can democracy work under these circumstances?

Wilders in the Netherlands won 23% in the 2023 general election on a platform of – seriously – banning the exercise of the Islamic religion. Who really thinks this is a good idea, let alone feasible and compatible with constitutional government? The election was right after the Hamas attack, which I’m sure was decisive. Islamist extremists and islamophobic extremists need each other and de facto support each other, with the common goal of fostering hate and confrontation.

In the EU election, Wilders was down to 17%. Perhaps because he had to publicly disavow parts of his anti-Islam platform in order to enter into a coalition with other right wing parties. Another experiment in „fighting“ the extreme right by giving them power. Wilders does not get a government office though.

On the question of the causes:

I think the temporal distance from 1945 cannot be overestimated as a contributing factor. The rise of fascist movements to political relevance in Europe and the US coincides with the disappearance of the last people with personal experience of fascism and the world war.

Also not to be underestimated is the role of Putin as a sponsor of almost every right wing extremist movement.

Structurally we are in the middle of the end of the fossil fuel economy while experiencing the first catastrophic effects of climate heating. This causes anxiety and insecurity while the dying fossil fuel industry would rather destroy the planet than go away. It’s no coincidence that every single right wing extremist party, and many establishment right wing parties, are in the pockets of the fossil lobby and are programmatically fighting the green transition.

Another structural factor that I think is important but is more ambivalent is the widespread decline in fertility. All wealthy and many mid income countries now are below replacement and many, including China and Russia, have entered or are about to enter the actual contraction phase. Rightwingers see this as a threat and react with panic. This may partly explain why right wing propaganda is so heavily dominated by doom and gloom. American, French or German nationalists, instead of appealing to the greatness of the nation, paint their own country as hopelessly rotten.

Alex SL asks,

“And do you seriously believe that if 54% of Germans voted in favour of the Alternative fuer Deutschland at the next election, policies would be exactly the same as if 54% of Germans voted in favour of the Greens?”

No. But I do believe that Germans voting for the Greens could reasonably expect the closing-down of nuclear power plants if the Greens won. I do not think the Germans voting for the AfD would lead to a comparably-dramatic decline in non-European immigrant presence in Germany.

Sam: „Germans voting for the Greens could reasonably expect the closing-down of nuclear power plants if the Greens won.“

Ironically, the closing down of the NPP had nothing to do with the Greens winning. The law was passed in 2011 under Merkel and most NPPs were retired while the Greens were in opposition.

„Non-European immigrant presence“ in Germany is rather small (unless you count the descendants of Turkish immigrants born in Germany as non-European; important to know that the AFD has hatched plans to deport naturalized immigrants and their descendants).

Right wingers are already making these people‘s lives as miserable as they can and this will only get worse. But the effects of the AFD winning elections will be felt in many policy areas, not just immigration and refugees but for example energy, culture and public broadcasters, courts and the rule of law, police, social policy, gender equality, queer rights, …

“Do you attribute your exceptional virtue to DNA or divine election?”

How about luck? I am more virtuous than Nazis, but not b/c of my genes, but b/c I am lucky.

Alex SL@41 is in my judgment disingenuous. Alex SL claims now to have found the proposition that voting rarely changes policy unobjectionable.* But that’s not true I think. I think the exchange clearly was about voting as an everyday practice, normal operations, routinely the source of policy. I say when voting in elections actually makes a decisive difference, it is because of political crisis which began with splits in the ruling strata over something like financial crisis or war or maybe even internecine rivalries. And then the voting is simply a measure of relative power, one of the mechanisms for deciding who is the winner without resorting to violence within the class.

Alex SL I think clearly means voting is the root of political power. And like all good people agrees with Spider-Man that with the original power comes the ultimate responsibility. That is what I objected to, and I still think it is nonsense with a reactionary bent.

Alex SL, after claiming not to despise the people in general, invents a Mavis to stand in. Condemning Mavis is condemning them. The excuse for this is supposed to be the people have freely chosen to believe “Murdoch,” another stand in, who would be powerless if he was able to sell to the audience. But this is all wrong.

Murdoch, literally and figuratively, doesn’t sell to the audience/Mavis, Murdoch sells the audience to advertisers, who are generally rich people. Back in the day, when Fox News as the struggling upstart facing down CNN, I noticed how every small business I encountered had Fox News on the waiting room TV. Fox cultivated its audience for years, to sell that audience to the advertisers (who I think are the usual suspects in the Marxist rogues’ gallery, sorry.) The notion the audience is the customer is a specific example of the wrongness of thinking the consumer is the kind of capitalism, stems from that error.

And of course, relying on the thin excuse that free speech is free, then the people are obviously to blame for general course of events, because they voted and that generally determines the general course of events obviously. The circle is complete and as the ancient Greeks observed, perfect. Except of course, speech isn’t free, it costs. Someone with a bank of amplifiers will drown out someone with just their own voice. And money buys repetition too, another way to monopolize (not literally!) the public space Mavis supposedly free chooses from. Crude as the analogy, it applies. And Alex SL verges on denying the power of propaganda (except in designated enemy nations?)

But I think in the end the perspective is fundamentally religious, a disguised version of supernatural free will, probably with some incoherent philosophical mishmash (usually called compatibilism.) This sort of thing is by far the majority view in philosophy but perversely I still reject it. If you really want to see what the masses think, look at the rare occasions when they actually engage in politics. I also reject Burke in favor of Paine, Nietzche in favor of Marx. I look back and think this is what people really want (allowing for changes in historical situation and the exigencies of events) and agree with them. Others look back in religious horror. It is impossible in the end to argue religous dogma, I’m done.

On a personal note, it seems to me that Alex Sl’s alleged “plain” reading isn’t at all plain if the entire paragraph in @18 is read. The reference to censorship of TikTok only makes sense if I thought that people in social media did in fact have *some agency. Thus when Alex SL compares the alleged plain reading to a dichotomy like denying a sister, it is a false dichotomy, a fallacy. How much matters. But Alex SL didn’t ask for clarification, I think because Alex SL is trying to defend the personal bailey.

@J, not that one 32

I don’t think I ever said that religious violence is always instigated by rebels against the status quo, in fact even when we speak of wars of religions it is because the “rebels” are now the local status quo fighting against the status quo somewhere else.
That said, certainly the Catholic church did a lot of repression.

My impression is that, since anglo countries are mayority protestant, for a certain period there was a certain implicit assumption that the RC was the only or main example of religious obscurantism, with stuff like inquisition, the process to Galilei etc..
More recently though there was a swing in public opinion, so for example it is more known that stuff like witch hunts were more a bipartisan thing between catholics and protestants, with the inquisition actually limiting the witch hunts (while giving intellectual fuel to them), recognizing that protestants were also quite obscurantist (see Tycho Brahe) etc..

I think this cultural swing is what you perceive as a pro-catholic fashion, and perhaps there can be exaggerations in it, but in many cases is just a corrective to a previous anti-catholic bias IMHO (in anglo culture, not in other places that are mayority catholic obviously).

@Trader Joe 34

I’m sorry I don’t follow your argument: hiw do budget constraint prevent Meloni from, say, mistreating immigrants? It is more likely that such constraints give her an excuse to treat them worse.
Sure Meloni cannot have a huge deficit to finance huge military investments to then invade France, but this wasn’t in the cards to begin with.

Mujtaba Rahman:
I think Macron’s allies believe it would have been impossible for him to continue governing with 15 percent of the vote and a 17-point gap with the far right in the European elections. Passage of the budget would have been very challenging in 2025, and there was a very high probability of censure motions that would’ve potentially precipitated the fall of his government later in the year. So I think in Macron’s imagination, he was getting ahead of an inevitability, and better for him to seize the initiative and take the fight to Le Pen and the opposition than have them dictate the likelihood of an early election by engineering these votes of confidence that could ultimately have resulted in the collapse of his government.

Now, it’s true that constitutionally, it’s up to Macron to call an election. And it’s true that in the face of a censure motion, he could fire his prime minister, he could reshuffle his government, he could avoid an election. But I think the general sense is there would be a volley of censure motions from the opposition, and at some point, he would’ve been obliged to call one.

The final thing I would say here is even if Le Pen delivers a majority in the National Assembly, the one thing Macron may then be able to do is constrain her because he’ll still be in the Élysée. Is it better to have an open boulevard for Le Pen to win both the Élysée and deliver a majority in the National Assembly in 2027 or better that the far right comes to power earlier, but is more constrained by virtue of the fact that Macron would still be president?

I hadn’t realized the extent to which he’d be painted into a corner if he didn’t make this move now.

and about Meloni and the game she is playing – the philosophical creativity of it could be a role model for Macron – as he also could pretend that he is more of a ‘Fascist’ in order to collect more of the Dumb Right Wing Voters and
THEN
like ‘the beautiful’ Meloni (as Trump would perhaps call her)
govern
‘beautifully’ –
against the Crazy Right Wingers!

@Trader Joe 51

It certainly is a real check on policy, but it is also a check on leftish policies.
There is also the problem that right leaning parties, being nationalist, can play the “Bruxelles makes me do this” card, while leftish parties, that are overall more pro EU, cannot do this so easily because this pushes voters towards the nationalistic right leaning parties.

J@32

I wasn’t talking about religious violence in general and was puzzled by your suggestion that religious violence is always instigated by rebels against the status quo.

Seeing as though Ireland has ‘entered the chat’ through a remark by the OP, it bears mention that, in the face of the threat posed by avowedly anti-religious Republicanism, the RC hierarchy flipped from seeking to undermine the British Protestant state into a clear rapprochement with the British against Irish radicals, which lasted all the way through to 1922.

@’The crazy right wingers (Salvini) are part of her government though.
Or maybe I misunderstood what you mean’.

You didn’t – as it is even more ‘beautiful’ (Italian) to govern against members of your own government too.

Quoting myself @5, “It’s not clear to me how a bitterly divided parliament doesn’t neuter itself, leaving Macron’s presidential prerogative free to act.” Here’s a constructive criticism or maybe trial balloon from a friend of France and Macron, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-macron-considering-using-frances-emergency-powers/

‘So, not as bad as Salvini, but certainly smarter and really not a centrist’.

and as ‘European Italians’ we actually don’t care what she ‘politically’ is
(or not)
as long as she stays with US in the EU
(and defends the defence of a European Ukraine)
and if she got all these votes for doing –
something completely different –
THAT’s what Macron could test too?

@TM 63

Well during that period a lot of stuff happened:

Berlusconi, the very charismatic leader of the right since the 90s, disgraced himself in a sex scandal and later died, creating a power vacuum in the right;

the Lega party went from a local party of northern italians being racist against southern italians to a national party of italians being racist against immigrants (this happened earlier and is what propelled Salvini to 34%);

the “democratic party”, that is generally portrrayed as the prosecution of the communist party but is really an amalgam of ex-communist and the left part of the old christian democrats (who have a lot of influence in the party) is in constant identity crisis (personified by Renzi who lead the party from 2013 to 2018, but now is the head of another “centrist” party with 8%, he also sabotaged a leftish government inbetween forcing Draghi into government);

between the 2018 election ant the 2022 one there were 3 different governments with a different set of alliances, and during the last two of these governments COVID happened;

the populist movement of M5S, which originally was neither left of right, managed to get 35% of the votes, but then immediately after the rgiht leaning voters of M5S realized that there were lefties in the party and defected for Lega, but thes Salvini miscalculated and managed to self-kick out from the governmet leaving the remaining leftish M5S to govern with the left (the first 2 of the 3 governments mentioned above) etc.

So it was quite hectic.

I think it is more a sort of long term general identity crisis of the mayor parties, plus the fact that both voters and politicians are not used to the Fptp system and don’t vote strategically, which makes things very volatile.
The “double soul” of the Democratic party is also a big part of the identity crisis and it is easy to miss from the outside, too, but it turns the Dems into a group of backstabbers, which is a big problem.

@tm 65

I skimmed the article about Ganz and didn’t find it convincing, not for Italy at least.
IMHO what happened in the 90s is that the left, that was in the backfoot since the 80s, become left-neoliberal, and in this way could get back to power.
This had the perverse effect that the right had to become populist, because the left stole that specific place.
In Italy this happened more immediately also because the previous dominant center right party imploded, so the change was more abrupt.

The Ganz article insists on the idea that white males hate equality, but while assholes exist and often vote right, this doesn’t explain why the right had to cater to that particular public starting from the 90s, and also is a psychologically satisfactory idea for lefties that notes that in that period racial or gender inequality was falling, but ignores that economic inequality was rising.

The changing racial dinamics didn’t really happen in Italy.

We also know from Picketty (in an article about changing politicc demographics) noted that in the same period the left changed from the party of the not educated to the party of the educated, probably because the amount of people with high education and lowish income increased, which probably pushed the right into being anti science.

So this sort of populism we have today is, naturally, a continuation of some trends from 30 years ago, but IMHO not the ones Ganz says.