Post #31828 by ges on the US Policy board

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Kakistocracy has been used to describe bad governments since the time of the English Civil War. In a piece by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian, he wrote:

… 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’.”

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