Matt Gaetz was selected to lead the Department of Justice. Fox host covering the Department of Defense and transportation. Elon Musk is appointed as head of layoffs. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz, who oversee the nation’s health.
Some liken the election of Donald Trump to a clown car. Some are calling the next leader a kakistocracy, or, in the words of Merriam-Webster, a “government of the worst people.”
The word has been trending online, with search traffic surging in recent weeks and a new subreddit dedicated to it. This isn’t the first time Trump has (accidentally) made this phrase famous. Many discovered it during his first term. But even after Gates’ departure, the kakistocracy of 2016 looks more like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood than the president-elect’s new allies.
This isn’t the first time the president has spread the word. Trump would be horrified to learn that he shares this distinction with several of America’s less-discussed presidents, including Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur. This trio, somehow forgotten even though the middle trio was assassinated, led the United States from the late 1870s to the early 1880s. This post-Reconstruction period saw the expansion of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, and another election in which political parties clashed over the outcome. As Kelly Wright, assistant professor of language science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out, based on data from the Oxford English Dictionary, usage of the word skyrocketed during this period. “Hayes’ tenure was described as a complete kakistocracy,” she says. (1880 was also a general election year in Great Britain, another country known for its contribution to the English language. William Gladstone became Prime Minister for the second time that year. Perhaps his opponents also He was probably one of the people who supported the word.
In fact, as Andre 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 that “something like the madness of kakistocracy” was looming. It was used.
Of course, its roots go back even further. Borrowed from the Greek word kakistos, or “worst,” the word itself probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, meaning “to defecate.”
In other words, as Nancy Friedman wrote in Substack on Language in 2016, “Kakistocracy can be described as ‘rule by assholes.'”
The term resurfaced on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Initially, it tended to refer not to an absolute aristocracy, but to a government of people who were “immature, ignorant, and not virtuous,” but by the 20th century, it more often referred to a government of corrupt people. Spicer writes. Today, Friedman’s definition seems most appropriate.
For some of these, there is a diagnosis, and with a diagnosis there may be a cure.
nicole holiday
But why has a word that is rarely used in common conversation been used for so long? Nicole Holliday, acting assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, calls this usage of the term sick. He says this by comparing it to the identification of Say.
Wright agrees. People who embrace this term may be thinking, “I didn’t know there was a word for this, but now I know it helps me understand what’s going on,” she says. .
Holliday says Americans love labels. “We like to have words to represent things, because that way they seem recognized as things.” – In what sociolinguists call “registration,” kakist Cracie becomes an identifiable phenomenon. “Language is social,” Holliday said, “and when you talk about things in a traditional way, you feel less alone, especially when other ways of explaining a situation feel inadequate.” ”.
Of course, it’s not just modern American leftists who use this term. Another former Fox host, Glenn Beck, used it during the Obama years. Boris Yeltsin also received this honor. In fact, Wright says usage has remained fairly stable over five centuries.
“We don’t have the opposite of kakistocracy, because it’s assumed that competence is the normal order of things,” Holliday says. “It’s not remarkable that the government is run by the most capable people, because that’s actually what you think should happen. It’s only noteworthy if it isn’t. .”
