Under Wednesday’s piece on Jeffries, a reader named Joseph took issue with its central sentence. I had written that retribution punishes people for who they are and justice applies the law to what was done. Joseph: “Used in this way, retribution is being used as a synonym for revenge,” when retributive justice properly means punishment that fits the crime and compensation for victims, the rebalancing that deters the next offense. Then he made the historical claim: Andrew Johnson let the Confederate leadership off and aborted Reconstruction, Ford pardoned Nixon before the crimes were fully exposed, nobody was punished for 2008, Reagan escaped Iran-Contra, and the lawlessness of what this publication has been calling the Epstein class is the compound interest on all of it.
He is right about the word, and I should say so before anything else. Retribution, in the sense philosophers and sentencing judges use it, is the principle that a wrong deserves a proportionate answer, imposed by lawful authority, without regard to who the wrongdoer is. That is close to the opposite of what the president meant at CPAC in 2023 and what Jeffries meant on Morning Joe. Both of them were using it to mean revenge: punishment aimed at enemies because they are enemies. I adopted their usage to argue against it, which conceded the definition to the people misusing it. Joseph’s version is the one the law means, and under his version the question for the new Congress is simpler than the one I posed: is proportionate punishment for documented wrongdoing a thing this country does, or a thing it keeps deciding to skip for the sake of calm?
Four times in the last 160 years it has chosen calm. Here is what calm cost.