Of "Kakistocracy": A Few Words

The reader of this blog may be familiar with the words "oligarchy," "plutocracy," "kleptocracy."

"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.

"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.

"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.

"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.

A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on the Anglosphere's official "Disapproved" list.

I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.