Death Wish?

Is capital punishment still popular? It has hardly been polled this century. They would no more poll that these days than poll whether or not you would want your daughter to marry a black man, which they also did used to ask people. Most people would now find either of those questions equally offensive.

Are we to believe in the glories of the American criminal justice system? Well, there we are, then. Even Priti Patel now claims that she was only ever speaking theoretically, in the way that American Supreme Court nominees and the like have to cover their backs about their Law School essays defending the theory of segregation. 

Very soon, in the natural scheme of things, no one with any such need will emerge as either a potential Home Secretary over here or a potential Supreme Court Justice over there. Indeed, that may already be the case. When it comes to the churches, then most people in and out of them almost certainly now assume that they have always been against it, or at least for as long as they have been against slavery.

And the Old Right has never much liked this extreme manifestation of the power of the Whig or Jacobin State, in the way that it has never much liked nuclear weapons. Enoch Powell was strongly opposed to both, and on very similar grounds. Peter Hitchens now hedges about his support for both principles with conveniently impossible caveats and conditions. And the American paleoconservatives mostly no longer even bother with the decoration.

Not that it matters very much. The death penalty is simply never coming back in any country that no longer has it. And it will be gone in the United States within 20 years. Slavery also lasted longer there. But even there, it was abolished eventually.