non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Your pinks party does sound rather leftist after that one paragraph. If you added another paragraph with what the Pinks would actually do about it, I think they'd sound a lot less leftist, since any sort of enforcement mechanism would be a hierarchy. I don't think the party that suggests throwing people in jail for trading poems would be recognizably more leftist than a party that is willing to just stick to currency abolition but otherwise lets people live free.
Your framework also doesn't work well for comparing parties that are different amounts of leftist on different issues. Lets say there's a country of Examplestan, in which everyone is a fervent follower of Examplestani Leftism. They all work hard to make Examplestan a better place, they don't use any currency and simply ask for goods and services but never ask for more than they need, no one ever coerces anyone or creates any sort of hierarchy within Examplestan. However, they think every human outside of Examplestan is less than a worm. They don't expand past their borders, but anyone who enters Examplestan from the outside is either shot dead or enslaved because of their ethnic impurity. Is Examplestan far right or far left?
You've already said your model fails at describing how far right parties are, at best it can try to calculate how not-leftist a party is. But it also cannot accurately assess any party which are left on some issues and right on other issues, since it can't asses the issues they're right-wing on. Which is many parties.
Where would it place something like Ba'athism? Or Peronism?
In my model, you simply would not try to compare them to Democrats or Republicans or Stalinists or Nazis, at least not in an international context. You can try to guess where a Peronist or Stalinist or Ba'athist would fall if you brought them into the context US election, or brought the US parties into the context of a specific foreign election, but you couldn't compare them in a purely international context. If you do compare them in an international context, that goes outside my model.
And I think trying to model them in an international context is a flawed endeavor doomed to fail, personally. There's a reason why people argue about whether Peronists and Ba'athists are far left or far right or if you need to bring a political compass in it whatever- I don't think it is possible to compare parties in an international way. I think people intuitively use the principles I've laid out when modeling domestic politics, without consciously knowing what those principles are. And people try to apply the same principles to international politics to come up for a label for Ba'athists or Peronists, but they can't draw an intuitive conclusion and start disagreeing with each other and even themselves about where such parties fall. They start making up rules like yours and try to calculate how anti-hierarchy a party is in sum, or a right-libertarian might say the more pro-freedom a party is in sum the more right-wing they are, or they might use some other model. Whatever set of rules they use, it doesn't work well, because it's an impossible to task.
Like we agreed as a guiding principle, any definition should match how people actually use the terms left and right. If people call the same party both left and right, then it's impossible for any definition that assigns each party to a single point on a line to function. I don't know whether people inside Argentina call Peronists left or right, but whatever they call Peronists inside their country, I'm sure it's internally consistent, although perhaps only for a single election and are not consistent across time even within Argentina. Same with Ba'athists in Syria.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Yes, they'd both support those policies, yet they would never actually pass a bill together with those policies. That disconnect from the extremes supporting the same positions but never actually working together is the core point I'm making.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob.
Maybe you'll just dismiss this as another "left as an exercise to the reader", but let's say we forget money, and directly consider exchange of services. Let's say Alice really want a servant, like the previous scenario, but her society has abolished currency so she has no money to pay Bob with. She can still pay with services or goods she crafts herself. Maybe she's a brilliant poet that can write a poem that can move Bob to tears in five minutes, and Bob happily embraces being her full time servant in exchange for one such poem a day. Would leftists somehow try to shut down that moneyless hierarchy too? You can replace "poem" for anything too- maybe she cooks excellent meals, maybe she has a green thumb and can grow far more produce than any other individual, maybe she's a brilliant engineer who can design and build an entire house by herself.
And of course, once you allow for that sort of hierarchy, you by necessity allow for much more complex ones. Perhaps Alice pays Bob with a fraction of her own labour, and also employs a couple other people like Charlie and David the same way, all of them pledging 8 hours of their days to her. But she then has each of them use 4 of those 8 hours to do services for another 3 even less productive people to get those 3 people to do her 8 hours of service a day- and so on until she has a network of hundreds working for her. All voluntary, all without money or even necessarily any private property at all, yet without a doubt a hierarchy.
My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.
My point is that that single point in theoritical space is non-existent. Unless you mean the point is just how much people pledge themselves to the idea of "no hierarchy" with no relation to how anti-hierarchical they are in real life or even how hierarchical their utopian vision is. In which case I think that is a coherent measurement system to compare parties by, but also a pretty useless measurement system that doesn't tell you anything practical. Why should anyone care how much lip service a party pays to "no hierarchy"?
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
I think these are useful observations that do mean something. People often do use left/right as boo lights. But they also use them as meaningful terms. Calling someone "far right" or "far left" wouldn't be an insult if they didn't have real meaning. There's a reason why libertarians want to convince you that Hitler was actually a leftist, and why progressives want to convince you Bernie is a centrist in Europe. My model gives a framework to ignore those people without losing the utility of the terms "far right", "right", "centrist", "left", and "far left" to describe how willing a party is to cooperate with other parties quickly.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.
(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)
Ra'am working more closely with the left parties despite having more in common with the conservative parties from a naive view is exactly what I'm describing. My model accepts that as normal behaviour, whereas most models would need to add a bunch of epicycles to explain it away.
Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.
I agree that this is a solid counter-example that goes against my model. But as you say, when you factor in voters eventually growing upset with the ruling coalition resulting in some real politik, it makes sense that the cost isn't worth the benefit for small parties. Did the FDP still mostly vote with the Grosse Koalition even if they weren't officially part of it, or did they do a lot of protest no votes?
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.”
In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Second- Removing hierarchies in practice
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
The many documented examples of Senators Hawley and Sanders voting together against the center. Sometimes they're joined by Cruz, Warren, etc.
I acknowledged that as negative cooperation. It is common. I am saying postive cooperation is shockingly rare or even non-existent. Have Hawley and Sanders ever voted yes together on a bill that the centrists voted no on?
And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
That seems like a bit of a reach to me. Leftists don't usually want to abolish literally every hierarchy either. And it doesn't explain why authoritarian communists are on the left side of the political spectrum, since those states involve a very strict hierarchy.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
My theory does not apply to parties positions on policies, identities, or individual's positions on policies. You'd need another theory to describe all that. My theory is solely about how parties actually behave relative to each other, and what to label parties as a whole.
Political coalitions shift, maybe one day the socialists prefer working with the liberals, and the next they prefer the communists. But the core of my theory is that no matter have much coalitions shift, you'll never see a discontinuous coalition that excludes centrists while including both the right and left. At least not a coalition that ever actually ever passes anything.
It's not an unified theory of everything political. But I think it is useful. It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I don't think I've had this problem on themotte, but I've definitely had it frequently on reddit. Sometimes it seems to be almost random, and in those cases I don't mind, I can accept the reddit hivemind being occassionally schizo. But often it'll be because I say something right-libertarian on a standard lefty sub. And while I certainly can understand redditors disagreeing with the vibe of the post, I'm left frustrated and unknowing what their actual disagreement is.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think you might be able to do the police thing with some success. I'd be interested in some sort of affirmative action experiment where you vastly increase the amount of black officers in a city, and see if that offers any protection against racism accusations.
What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?
The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.
Part 1
I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.
How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.
This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.
In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.
Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.
The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.
Part 2- Other theories
This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?
The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.
My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.
To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.
Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Good luck!
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=C9IFPgcRk8M
Fig trees are pretty crazy
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Buy some earbuds and listen to some audibooks while I'm rolling? That hardly sounds like a bad way to spend my time if I'm getting paid
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Did any of your peers regard any teachers fondly at the time? No one was going, "Oh, it's too bad you got Mrs. Alice for math, she can't teach! I'm lucky I got Mr. Bob, he's hilarious and makes the subject make sense"?
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read.
There are tons of drag-and-drop educational programming apps that teach stuff like loops and functions.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think children hold the good teachers in high regard. Most teachers aren't good. I think if we broke teachers unions and empowered school choice, we could quickly see a great deal of very good teachers teaching. Everyone loves a good teacher in the right circumstances, from students to parents to administrators to the good teacher themselves because it's such a fulfilling job. But in public schools where the principals receive the same salary regardless of performance, and powerful unions dedicated to preserving jobs over teaching children, good teachers are secondary to minimally risky teachers who don't get the school bad press.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I could see Poland getting close if they had ideal policies and conditions and pulled of something similar to the east Asian tigers. I doubt they would but I'd give it maybe a 1% chance. Especially since they, and their neighbors the Baltics, appear to have had some pretty good economic policies post-communism and are growing pretty fast.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I don't think that's normally how American law is applied, but admittedly I don't know much about it. But where most people seem to blame an anti-Trump conspiracy, I blame him for losing his case. He intimidated witnesses on social media, so the judge gave him a gag order, then he violated the gag order repeatedly. He didn't stand for the jury like the rest of the court. He's been terrible to many previous lawyers so he was pulling from the bottom of the barrel for his defense.
I think Trump deserved to be proclaimed Not Guilty. But the adversarial legal system is designed around the defendant actually putting a half decent effort into defending themselves. I can sympathize with all the poor folk out there who don't understand what the legal system expects them to do and get screwed on that front, but I have no sympathy for a billionaire. If Trump wasn't a narcissist, I think he could've won the trial.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
There's a great deal of productive work people can do with very little abstract thinking skill. I went through basic training recently. I was probably the smartest, or at least close to it, at stuff like algebra and writing essays and reading comprehension. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people there would have trouble with those sorts of problems and would need to go through a couple hours of lessons to consistently get those problems correct, and even then would probably forget those lessons after a few months.
But that didn't matter at all. In boot camp, the things that mattered were how well you polished boots, folded clothes, made it to the place you were supposed to be on time, could do the multi-step safety check on your rifle, could put together a lean-to to sleep under, and all the fitness stuff. Almost all those people with lower IQs could blow me out of the water at those tasks(although there were a couple people that I expect would be especially bad at math and were even worse than me at basic skills). For regular life skills, stuff that wasn't abstract, they could do great- they weren't some barely conscious apes that barely managed not to kill themselves, like I feel like we'd both expect after hearing they couldn't answer 100-17 with mental math.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think you're making good and accurate points and it's a shame you're getting downvoted. But there's one point I disagree on.
The unlawful means in question were Cohen making a payment to Stormy Daniels in order to conceal her story from the public in order to prevent it from damaging Trump's election chances.
I don't think this should actually be considered a crime. As I understand it, Cohen pled guilty to it. I think that was part of a plea deal and he just took it because the way plea deals work is that he wouldn't actually receive a better outcome by trying to insist that one, but only one, of the things he was being charged with was false.
But looking at the actual law, the idea that concealing information which could damage Trump's campaign is a campaign contribution is silly. If you're that loose with the standards, practically anything would be a campaign contribution.
I'm not sure about the ratios myself, but it's for that sort of reason I want to increase Congressional salaries. No one is in Congress for the money, pretty much everyone competent enough to be a federal politician could be making more money in some other job. To some degree that's inevitable- the public sector will never match the sort of spending in the private sector, nor should it. But if we want very competent people to be leaders, we should at least try to pay them half of what they'd get in the private sector instead of a quarter. And I think if being a Congress member was a better job to have, people would be less willing to risk that career by being corrupt.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/congressional-pay?r=62ico
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