(Roughly) Daily

The Economist chooses it’s Word of the Year…

“Some years it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?…

… For the year’s defining word, it helps to look back—a long way. English has a host of political terms derived from Greek, because it got a lot of its political thinking from the likes of Plato and Aristotle. So if you go through the lexicon (itself Greek), a few roots abound. Arche (ruler), for example, is found in monarchy, oligarchy and anarchy (the rule of one, the few and none, respectively).

Greek has another root for “rule”, kratia, which is even more common. It features in democracy, aristocracy, gerontocracy, theocracy and plutocracy, as well as meritocracy (a modern coinage for which Alan Fox, a British sociologist, married a Latin root with a Greek one in 1956). The Oxford English Dictionary is also full of rarer species such as ochlocracy (rule by the mob), gynaecocracy (rule by women) and thalassocracy (mastery of the seas).

Two other “-cracy” words seem appropriate in this election year. One is theatrocracy, or rule by theatre-goers. This sounds as if it might refer to dominance by the media elites writing for the culture sections of newspapers. But the word has its origins in Plato, who described people skilled in fanning the emotions of the crowd at a theatre into a powerful political force. This might, in hindsight, have been a good word of the year for 2016, when a former reality-TV star with a talent for working the crowd was first elected president.

After Mr Trump was re-elected on November 5th, the world watched anxiously as he began filling top jobs. Some picks, such as the sensible Susie Wiles for chief of staff and Marco Rubio, a long-serving senator, for secretary of state, were qualified and competent. But a flurry of nominations in the week ending November 15th led to a spike in people looking up another “-cracy” word on Google.

Matt Gaetz, accused of sex and drug crimes and the subject of a congressional ethics investigation, was nominated to be the country’s highest law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy junior, a man with crackpot views on vaccines, was to be secretary of health. Tulsi Gabbard, a conspiracy theorist with nice things to say about the despots of Syria and Russia, was to run America’s intelligence services. And Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host sporting tattoos associated with the far right (and who had been accused of sexual assault) was tapped as defence secretary. [For more on these picks– with an update on the AG selection– see here.]

So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. “Kakistocracy” is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally “rule by the best”. Having spiked on Google Trends the day after Mr Trump’s election, kakistocracy jumped a second time in the wake of these nominations. Searches surged a third time on November 21st, when Mr Gaetz announced that he would withdraw from consideration for attorney-general, suggesting that he was seen as the worst of the worst. The term was particularly popular in Democratic strongholds such as Oregon, Massachusetts and Minnesota.

Much remains to be seen about Mr Trump’s new kratia. Last time round he seemed to fire more officials than most presidents have trips on Air Force One. (Many then became outspoken critics.) This time, though, he has chosen his people for their loyalty above all. And many of his supporters are delighted, seeing in his appointments a wrecking crew to pull down a deep state they loathe.

Kakistocracy has the crisp, hard sounds of glass breaking. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on whether you think the glass had it coming. But kakistocracy’s snappy encapsulation of the fears of half of America and much of the world makes it our word of the year…

The Greeks knew how to talk about politics and power: “The Economist’s word of the year for 2024,” from @economist.com.

* “President Camacho” (Terry Crews) in Mike Judge‘s Idiocracy

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As we batten down the hatches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1949 that the film All the King’s Men premiered. Based on Robert Penn Warren‘s Pulitzer Prize- winning novel of the same name, centered on the rise and fall of a populist demagogue in the American South (based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long).

At the 22nd Academy Awards the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three; Best Picture, Best Actor for Broderick Crawford, and Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge (in her film debut). The film also won five Golden Globes and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

In 2001, All the King’s Men was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

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