Popular demand for punishment of witches frequently outran official zeal everywhere

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 114.

It was in this atmosphere that the Salem witch scare began.

In approaching it, we will do well to recall that New Englanders did not invent witchcraft or witch trials. In the seventeenth century virtually everyone in the Western world believed that the devil confederated with human beings and either enabled them to inflict harm by supernatural means or else did it for them. There were arguments about the extent of the powers that God allowed the devil. Some people held that the devil did not have much power beyond the ability to foresee events, so that he could get his witches to go through a lot of hocus-pocus just before, say, a big storm was coming. He could thus delude the witch—and everyone else—into thinking she had caused the storm. Others believed that both the devil and his witches could actually cause things like storms or sickness or fatal accidents. But virtually no one, whether learned or ignorant, doubted the existence of witchcraft, and very few doubted that it should be punished when detected.

How little unusual the New Englanders were in this respect can be seen from the fact that throughout the colonial period there were 32 executions for witchcraft in New England, including those at Salem, while in Europe and England during the same period the numbers ran into the thousands. For example, in Germany in the two cities of Würzburg and Bamberg there were 1,500 executions in the eleven years between 1622 and 1633. The numbers involved in proportion to total population were probably higher than in New England. For example, in the town of Oppenau, in Germany’s Black Forest, with a population of 650, 50 persons were executed in less than a year and 170 more accused when the trials were stopped in June 1632. England did not have as much trouble with witches as Germany, but between 1563 and 1685 there were roughly 1,000 executions. The last execution in England was in 1685, the last in New England in 1692. But in England and on the Continent after formal executions stopped, popular lynchings of alleged witches continued until the nineteenth century. And I might add that during the height of the trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries popular demand for punishment of witches frequently outran official zeal everywhere. Even the high priests of the Inquisition in Spain often showed more compassion than the people at large.

Useful and interesting facts for context.

However, the last line is an interesting one as it encapsulates a central paradox of democracy. In our federal republican democracy, our institutions and Mandarin Class need the legitimacy which arises from the consent of the public which is often at odds with the objectives of the Mandarin Class.

Popular sentiment is often wildly capricious, highly judgmental, and usually far more conservative than the leading lights of institutions (left and right). This is true everywhere.

Mandarin Class support for eliminating capital punishment, supporting abortion options, for redeeming rather than punishing criminals, etc. in most OECD countries runs a generation or two ahead of the populace. The last execution in England occurred in 1964 and public preferences still lean towards capital punishment.

The paradox is that some of the moral objectives of the Mandarin Class require a consent of the governed from a democratic majority largely unfriendly to those Mandarin Class objectives. The more the the Mandarin Class objectives get ahead of the those of the populace, the more it undermines commitment to consent of federal, republican democracy.