Word of the week: Kakistocracy

The second coming.

When I published a post about kakistocracy — government by the worst, least, qualified, or most unscrupulous people¹ — after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I hoped never to write about the word, or the subject, again.

How naive. How optimistic.

Kakistocracy is back in the headlines, for reasons that should be obvious, and so I am reluctantly revisiting it. I also bring you a linguistic update to my eight-year-old blog post.

Here’s Fast Company on November 13, 2024:

A lot of people have questions, and not only social media users.

Here’s The Nation on November 12, under the headline “The Future of Public Health—or Lack Thereof—Under Trump,” a reference to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: “In fact, the man who thought it was a good idea to stage a hit-and-run with a dead baby bear and a bicycle in Central Park has shown a lack of judgment across the board for a long while. But he is part of an emerging kakistocracy-in-waiting that will be run by plutocrats and zealots.”

Here’s The Economist on November 7: “Mr Trump’s inner circle is composed chiefly of sycophants and chancers. A kakistocracy is a society governed by the worst and least qualified. It may be a useful word over the next four years.”

Here’s Noah Smith three days before the election, warning that “Trumpism is kakistocracy”: “It’s a word I used a lot during Trump’s first term, and which I expect to use again if he wins a second one.”

There’s an r/kakistocracy subreddit, created on November 12, 2024. Its inaugural post was headlined “Trump picks Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general.” Things went downhill from there.

And on November 16, 2024, The Atlantic published an essay headlined “American Kakistocracy,” written by Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini (gift link). Severgnini compares Donald Trump to the late Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, another “right-wing leader capable of attracting the most disappointed and least informed voters, who historically had chosen the left.” But, Severgnini writes, the comparison isn’t perfect:

Berlusconi respected alliances and was loyal to his international partners. He loved both Europe and America. He believed in free trade. And he accepted defeat. His appointments were at times bizarre but seldom outrageous. He tried hard to please everybody and to portray himself as a reliable, good-hearted man. Trump, as we know, doesn’t even try.

Aristocracy, writes Severgnini, means “government by the best.” Today, he continues, “we are in a kakistocracy, government by the worst. And tens of millions of American voters are proud of it, or at least happy to appear so.”

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When I wrote about kakistocracy in 2016, I included the OED’s earliest citation for the word, from an 1829 historical romance written by Thomas Love Peacock. But last week, in a post on the American Dialect Society’s listserv, legal scholar and Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred Shapiro provided a much earlier citation for the K-word, “probably as far back as can be found.”²

It was deployed, perhaps for the first time, in an August 1644 sermon preached by Paul Gosnold in Oxford “before the honorable members of the two Houses of Parliament,” and it came at the tail end of a 158-word sentence:

Therefore we need not make any scruple of praying against such: against those Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion, have pretended Religion to raise and maintaine a most wicked rebellion: against those Nero’s, who have ripped up the wombe of the mother that bare them, and wounded the breasts that gave them sucke: against those Cannibal’s who feed upon the flesh and are drunke with the bloud of their own brethren: against those Catiline’s who seeke their private ends in the publicke disturbance, and have set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges: against those tempests of the State, those restlesse spirits who can no longer live, then be stickling and medling; who are stung with a perpetuall itch of changing and innovating, transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy.

Gosnold’s audience would have known about Catiline, a Roman politician and soldier “best known for instigating the Catilinarian conspiracy—a failed attempt to violently seize control of the Roman state in 63 BC” (source: Wikipedia). He rallied “poor rural plebs, Sullan veterans, and other senators whose political careers had stalled.” He was killed in battle “and his army annihilated.”

Here’s how Gosnold ended his sermon, a defense of the British monarchy against Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads:

Good Lord! what wild irregular courses have these men runne, since the reines have layen loose upon them? I am afraid, they will never leave chopping and changing, plotting and practising, till in conclusion they bring all to confusion, all to an Anarchy or savage Ataxie, Prayer, Peace, Ierusalem, and all. Therefore it is no breach of charity to pray against these men. How long, Lord, how long holy and just shall our bloud and wrongs be unreveng'd upon them? how long shall the Devill and his instruments have place and power to deface and defile thy Temples, to profane thy service, to persecute thy ministers, to pursue the life and honour of thine Anointed, and to seduce the silly people like sheepe to the slaughter? How long shall they blaspheme thy Name and Religion by making it an instrument of such hellish practises? How long Lord, how long holy and just?

Amen.

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UPDATE, November 19: I couldn’t resist adding this, from political science professor Mark Copelovitch on Bluesky. For context, see “The Aristocrats.”

1. Or the shittiest, if you buy the theory that the Greek word for “worst,” kakistos, is probably related to Proto-Indo-European kakka, “to defecate.”

2. The Guardian had brought this 17th-century use of kakistocracy to light in an April 2018 article about, you guessed it, Donald J. Trump and “the wicked disorder that can result when expertise and ethical judgment are aggressively and systematically pushed aside.”