Extremism and Leftist Projection: Capital Punishment

This is the second in a series.  (The first is here.) You will have noticed that leftists call us extremists though there is nothing extreme about our views. They are all of them moderate. What our political enemies do is to project their extremism into us. Projection is a well-known psychological defense mechanism. What I am doing in this series is cataloging political forms of projection as practiced by hard-leftists, 'wokesters,' 'progressives,' whatever you want to call them.

So consider capital punishment. At the one extreme are those who deem  it always and everywhere wrong. This bunch includes every Democrat politician at the present time.  (I am open to correction if you can prove me mistaken.) At the opposite extreme, or in the vicinity of the opposite extreme, are those who readily employ capital punishment for all manner of supposed 'crimes.' There are of course plenty of historical examples, but at the present day the Iranians have distinguished themselves in this regard, which is not to say that other Muslim countries are much better.

The UN expert said vague charges, such as "enmity against God" and "corruption on Earth", were meanwhile used to sentence individuals to death for participation in protests, for other forms of dissent or where there was a lack of evidence for the accusations.

Judges trying capital and other cases also relied heavily on forced confessions extracted through torture and other forms of duress to prove guilt, he added.

[. . .]

At least 17 women were executed in total, eight more than in 2020, it adds. They included Zahra Esmaili and Maryam Karimi, who were convicted of murdering abusive husbands. Esmaili's lawyer is cited as saying that she suffered a heart attack as she watched several men being executed in front of her, and that officials still hanged her lifeless body.

Two men convicted of crimes committed when they were children were also put to death, according to the report. One of them, Arman Abdolali, found guilty of murdering his girlfriend in 2013 when he was 17, was taken to the gallows seven times in the months prior to his execution, it says.

In Iran, homosexuals are executed. By contrast, here in the decadent USA and elsewhere in the decadent West, homosexuals are not merely tolerated  but officially celebrated, celebrated by the government, as if their 'lifestyle' were on a moral par with every other 'lifestyle.'  

And so again we see that the position of  what I call the American conservative is moderate, sane, and reasonable. As an American conservative rooted in the principles and values of the Founding documents, I  say you are morally obtuse if you think that there is no conceivable circumstance in which capital punishment would be justified. And I say that you are both morally and intellectually obtuse if you agree with Roman, Nazi, or Iranian penology. This American conservatism itself avoids two extremes, that of throne-and-altar reaction (and its close cousin 'post-liberalism') and an extreme laissez-faire libertarianism-libertinism that overvalues the economic while undervaluing if not suppressing the cultural.  It takes on board the best of classical liberalism while avoiding the noxious extremes.