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Word of the Day: Kakistocracy [1]
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Date: 2025-04-02
I am in my seventh decade, and yet, here I am, having to learn new words, or apply words from other failed countries to our reality. It’s like being back in seventh grade.
The first new word I encountered was “Kakistocracy,” a word that, at first glance, took me back to childhood and the word “kaka,” which is what we called poop. The first part of the word comes from Ancient Greek: “Kakos” (Bad), “Kakion” (Worse), and “Kakistos” (Worst). The opposite would be “Agathos” (Good),“Ameinos” (Better), and “Aristos” (Best). I learned that “kakos” may be related to the Proto-Indo-European word *“kakka-,” meaning “to defecate.”
The word’s earliest known use was in a 1644 sermon by English Rector Paul Gosnold,who lamented that men had turned “our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy.” (Source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112190850/http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A41/A41582.html) This was during the First English Civil War, 1642-1646, when Oliver Cromwell’s forces, seeking greater parliamentary control, defeated the Royalists supporting King Charles I. Gosnold was a Royalist.
More relevant to our circumstances, American poet James Russell Lowell used the term in a January 19, 1876, letter to Joel Benton, writing, “What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a ‘government of the people by the people for the people,’ or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?” He ended the paragraph by writing, “Let us all work together (and the task will need us all) to make Democracy possible.” (Source:
https://archive.org/stream/lettersofjamesru21lowerich/lettersofjamesru21lowerich_djvu.txt) Lest we forget, a knave is a corrupt, unscrupulous, morally bankrupt person, i.e., Trump. Lowell wrote this during the Gilded Age, a time of rampant political corruption and massive wealth inequality—not unlike our own time. Kakistocracy refers to being governed by incompetent, corrupt, and stupid people, much like the “hollow clowns” Albert Camus described in his 1948 essay, “The Crisis ofMan.”
But there is more. In the 2010 essay, “Kakistocracy or the true story of what happened in the post-Soviet area,” Vahram Abadjian explained that the Russian model of kakistocracy was a merger between state institutions and oligarchs, leading to “the systematic plunder of national assets and establishment of a rule of lawlessness and illegal usurpation of power under the slogans of democracy and market economy.” (Source:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879366510000254)
Today, Trump, Musk, and the Republican Party are making America NOT great again by destroying the federal government, firing employees, and weakening agencies, all while empowering oligarchs through corruption. They act lawlessly to accrue power, usurp the legislative branch’s power of the purse, attack the judicial branch, and threaten to disobey rulings. They undermine elections to retain political power, defund federal and state governments to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy, and trample the Constitution—especially the Bill of Rights—among other atrocities. They are turning us into a Banana Republic. Imagine Trump ruling over a Russian-style kakistocracy called Amerika instead of a democracy. Actually, he’s incapable of ruling over anything else.
Kaka: Trump, Musk, and the Republican party are sh#t#ng all over America.
“Democracy? The task will need us all.”
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