The Anti-Populist

In 1876, as corruption scandals shook the Ulysses S. Grant administration, the poet, diplomat, and founding Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell wondered where the American experiment was headed. “Is ours a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’” he wrote, “or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?” Now there’s a $10 word for you. From the Greek kakos, for “bad,” kakistocracy means “rule by the worst.” It is in understandably wide circulation…