Matt Gaetz chosen to run the justice department. Fox hosts in charge of the Pentagon and transportation. Elon Musk as head of layoffs. And Robert F Kennedy Jr and Dr Oz overseeing the nation’s health.
Some have likened Donald Trump’s administrative picks to a clown car; others are calling our incoming leadership a kakistocracy, or “government by the worst people”, as Merriam-Webster puts it.
The word has been trending online, with a burst in search traffic in recent weeks and a new dedicated subreddit. It’s not the first time Trump has (accidentally) made the term famous; many discovered it in his first term. But even after Gaetz’s departure, the kakistocracy of 2016 looks like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood compared with the president-elect’s new batch of sidekicks.
It’s not the first time a president has popularized the term. Trump would be horrified to know he shares this distinction with several of America’s least-discussed presidents, including Rutherford B Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A Arthur. This trio – somehow forgettable despite the fact that the middle one was assassinated – led the US from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, a period following Reconstruction that saw the expansion of Jim Crow laws and segregation, as well as another election in which the parties clashed over the results. That span saw a surge in the use of the word, as Kelly Wright, assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out based on Oxford English Dictionary data. “Hayes’ term was absolutely being described as a kakistocracy,” she says. (1880 was also a general election year in the UK, another country known for its contributions to the English language. That year, William Gladstone became prime minister for the second time; perhaps his opponents were among those giving the word a boost.)
In fact, as André Spicer wrote in the Guardian in 2018, the term has been around since at least 1644, during the English civil war, when a sermon warned of “a mad kinde of Kakistocracy” looming.
Its roots, of course, go back even further – it’s borrowed from the Greek kakistos, or “worst”, which itself probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, meaning “to defecate”.
In other words, as Nancy Friedman wrote at her Substack on language in 2016, “you could say that kakistocracy is ‘government by the shitty’.”
The term resurfaced on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Initially it tended to refer to government by the “unskilled, unknowledgeable and unvirtuous”, rather than the infallible aristocracy, Spicer wrote, but by the 20th century, it referred more to government by the corrupt. Today, Friedman’s definition seems most apt.
But why does a word that is rarely used in common speech have such longevity? Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, likens the term’s use to identifying a disease: “Some of this is about there being a diagnosis, and if there’s a diagnosis, then maybe there’s a treatment,” she says.
Wright agrees. Those embracing the term, she says, may be thinking: “I didn’t know there was a word for this, and now that I do it helps me understand what’s going on.”
Americans, Holliday says, love labels. “We like having words for things, because then they seem like they’ve been en-thing-ified” – in what sociolinguists call “enregisterment”, kakistocracy becomes an identifiable phenomenon. “Language is social,” Holliday notes, and when we have “conventionalized ways of talking about things, it makes us feel less alone” – especially when other ways of describing the situation feel inadequate.
Of course, it’s not just the modern American left that uses the word; another ex-Fox host, Glenn Beck, used it during the Obama years; Boris Yeltsin also received the distinction. In fact, Wright says, usage has been fairly stable for five centuries.
“We have no real opposite of kakistocracy, because competency is assumed to be the normal order of things,” Holliday says. “It’s not notable that the government is being run by the most competent people, because, indeed, that’s what you think should be happening. It’s only notable when it’s not.”
This article was updated on 21 November 2024 to reflect Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration for attorney general.
