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    ‘Government by the worst’: why people are calling Trump’s new sidekicks a ‘kakistocracy’

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    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. More

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      Fascism, Donald Trump and George Orwell | Letters

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      Emma Brockes points out that the word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot (The word ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning. And Trump is using that to his advantage, 23 October). It was the same in George Orwell’s day. In his 1944 Tribune column he said that, “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless … I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” The best definition he could come up with was to suggest that “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’”.Neil SmithSolihull, West Midlands Although Emma Brockes provides examples of the usage of the word “fascist” to mean anyone in opposition to liberal elites, she should really have strictly defined it, and possibly pleaded that it has been so misused that the meaning has become obscured. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964) defines it as, “the principles and organization of the patriotic and anti-communist movement in Italy started during the 1914-18 war, culminating in the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini”. Thus of historic origin. Obviously, the word originates in the Latin fasces meaning a bundle; in ancient Rome a bundle of sticks enclosing an axe was a sign of law and power. Chambers Dictionary (2011) adds that it is militaristic, “characterised by restrictions on individual freedom”. It has become a loose insult to anyone who speaks out against the liberal left, or holds views that challenge or differ from the prevailing political ideology. Similar sloppy usage applies to “far right” and “far left” as well. Journalists should be advocates for precision in language in these somewhat combustible times.Dr Jane DonatiHarpenden, Hertfordshire More

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      ‘So uniquely her’: where did Kamala Harris’s self-help speaking style come from?

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      “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is a phrase Kamala Harris uses so often there are minutes-long supercuts available to watch on YouTube. It even has its own Wikipedia page. In other speeches, Harris has also expressed a belief in “the significance of the passage of time” and a desire to “honor the women who made history throughout history”.Since becoming the presumptive nominee, Harris has invigorated the Democratic party. It’s not only that she’s a much younger candidate than Biden; she also has a stump speech style that embraces metaphor and a new age vernacular not often heard in national politics. The meme accounts love to quote it. It’s even led some to draw comparisons with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s portrayal of Selina Meyer, the frothy politician in Veep. (In one episode, Meyer stumbles through a speech saying: “We are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states.”)Although she has proven herself to be one of the most detail-oriented and precise speakers in the Democratic party, Harris also indulges in certain looser Kamalaisms – for example, her now famous anecdote about falling out of a coconut tree and “existing in the context of all in which you live” – which garner (satirical or otherwise) appreciation from supporters and jeering from her detractors. But what are the origins of Harris’s unique speaking style?Gevin Reynolds, a former Harris speechwriter, says that a few of her most celebrated phrases (such as the aforementioned coconut tree and assertion that she’s the “first but not the last” female vice-president) come from her mother, the late biomedical scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris.“While her mother has passed away, the vice-president has kept her memory alive through sharing her words of wisdom to the world,” Reynolds said. “Every speaker has their favorite ‘fallback’ quotes. Most times, they’re corny and cliche. But the vice-president repeats her iconic phrases because they speak powerfully on so many occasions, not to mention they are so uniquely her.”Reynolds said that he “can’t take credit” for any of Harris’s greatest hits. “I imagine she has used many of them throughout her long career in public service, going back to her California days,” he said. “However, I got the chance to hear the kind of incisive questions she asks and comments she makes. She approaches every set of remarks like a prosecutor, attempting to assemble the facts of a case into a clear and compelling narrative.”Beth Blum, an associate professor of humanities at Harvard University who writes on the history of wellness literature, says Harris’s ethos – especially the “unburdened by what has been” quote – borrows from Eckhart Tolle’s 1997 bestseller, The Power of Now, an Oprah-approved tome that’s sold millions of copies worldwide.“This self-help doctrine – which actually dates back to antiquity – grows out of an effort to empower individuals to not be determined by their circumstances,” Blum said. “This phrase is just vaguely affirmative enough to reassure multiple demographics.”If Harris channels self-help rhetoric, she’s not alone among presidential candidates. Donald Trump’s parents brought him to Norman Vincent Peale’s church for Sunday sermons, and the former president maintains an affinity for The Power of Positive Thinking author’s favorite cliches. Peale told readers to “never think of yourself as failing”, something Trump took and ran with.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMarianne Williamson became Oprah’s “spiritual adviser” through her long career as a new age guru; Robert F Kennedy Jr counts Tony Robbins as a close friend and asked the coach to be his running mate. “Harris’s connections to self-help are subtler than these other candidates, and yet she finds herself the target of more memes aimed at exposing her reliance on such self-help rhetoric,” Blum said. “At this point, self-help rhetoric and American politics are fatefully entwined.”As the first Black and south Asian vice-president, Harris is facing a wave of racist and sexist online attacks, with some on the right engaging in bad-faith teasing of her speaking style. But after weeks of watching Joe Biden stumble at podiums, it’s been enlivening for supporters to see Harris speak passionately, and without a teleprompter, at her first few events as a candidate.Blum says Harris’s endless repetition of the “what can be, unburdened by what has been” line is reflective of her own enthusiasm: “It hints at the performative demands of her position. One marvels at her ability to utter this phrase with such verve and conviction time and time again, as if she is inventing it for the first time.” Truly, she is unburdened by what has been. More

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      The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians review – unpicking the lexicon of America’s leaders

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      Politicians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times, specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.Lozada has a literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.Tiny linguistic tics mark the clash between two versions of America’s fabled past and its prophetic future. Lozada subtly tracks the recurrence of the word “still” in Biden’s speeches – for instance his assertion that the country “still believes in honesty and decency” and is “still a democracy” – and contrasts it with Trump’s reliance on “again”, the capstone of his vow to Make America Great Again. Biden’s “still” defensively fastens on “something good that may be slipping away”, whereas Trump’s “again” blathers about restoring a lost greatness that is never defined. Biden’s evokes “an ideal worth preserving”; Trump’s equivalent summons up an illusion.At their boldest, Lozada’s politicians trade in inflated tales about origins and predestined outcomes, grandiose narratives that “transcend belief and become a fully formed worldview”. Hence the title of Hillary Clinton’s manifesto It Takes a Village, which borrows an African proverb about child-rearing and uses it to prompt nostalgia for a bygone America. Lozada watches Obama devising and revising a personal myth. Addressed as Barry by his youthful friends, he later insisted on being called Barack and relaunched himself as the embodiment of America’s ethnic inclusivity; his “personalised presidency” treated the office as an extension of “the Obama brand”. In this respect Trump was Obama’s logical successor, extending a personal brand in a bonanza of self-enrichment. The “big lie” about the supposedly stolen 2020 election is another mythological whopper. Trump admitted its falsity on one occasion when he remarked “We lost”, after which he immediately backtracked, adding: “We didn’t lose. We lost in the Democrats’ imagination.”All this amuses Lozada but also makes him anxious. As an adoptive American – born in Peru, he became a citizen a decade ago – he has a convert’s faith in the country’s ideals, yet he worries about contradictions that the national creed strains to reconcile. A border wall now debars the impoverished masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty; the sense of community is fractured by “sophisticated engines of division and misinformation”. Surveying dire fictional scenarios about American decline, Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a narrative advantage”: peace is boring, but predictions of a clash with China or an attack by homegrown terrorists excite the electorate by promising shock, awe and an apocalyptic barrage of special effects. Rather than recoiling from Trump, do Americans share his eagerness for desecration and destruction?Changing only the names of the performers, The Washington Book has a shadowy local replica. Here in Britain, too, ideological posturing has replaced reasoned argument, and buzzwords are squeezed to death by repetition. Whenever Sunak drones on about “delivering for the British people”, I think of him as a Deliveroo gig worker with a cooling takeaway in his backpack, or a weary postman pushing a trolley full of mortgage bills.Though such verbal vices are international, a difference of scale separates Washington from Westminster. In America, heroic ambition is brought low by errors of judgment or moral flaws that for Lozada recall “the great themes of literature and the great struggles of life”: Kennedy’s risky confrontations with Cuba, Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam, Nixon overcome by paranoia. To set against these tragic falls, we have only the comic spectacle of Boris Johnson gurning on a zip wire or Liz Truss vaingloriously granting an interview atop the Empire State Building; neither of them had the good grace to jump off. American politics is dangerously thrilling because it is so consequential for the rest of the world. In Britain we are doomed to sit through a more trivial show, an unfunny farce played out in a theatre that is crumbling around us. More