Rarely does an ancient Greek portmanteau word spark a Twitterstorm. But that’s what happened when the former director of the CIA John Brennan took to Twitter and accused Donald Trump of running a “kakistocracy”. This tweet sparked a 13,700% increase in people looking up the word using the online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary. These curious souls would have found a terse definition: “Government by the worst people.”

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The first recorded use of kakistocracy was in a sermon, delivered in 1644 by Paul Gosnold. His audience was the “King’s parliament” assembled in Oxford during the English civil war to support the monarchist cause. Gosnold warned of the dire consequences if “our well-temperd Monarchy” descended “into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy”. The term lay fallow for nearly 200 years, until it was revived by the 19th-century English satirist Thomas Love Peacock. In The Misfortunes of Elfin, he mocks the “agrestic kakistocracy” of his time, which treated “treading on old foot-paths, picking up dead wood, and moving on the face of the earth within sound of the whirr of a partridge” as “heinous sins”.

The word soon found fertile soil in the United States, where in 1838, William Harper, a US senator and defender of slavery, claimed that anarchy was a kind of kakistocracy. Decades later, in 1876, the American poet James Russell Lowell asked: “Is ours a ‘government of the people by the people for the people,’ or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”

The term was not just limited to the US. In an account of his travels to Australia, the English writer John Martineau, describes the remarkably poor quality of government there. In the 1869 publication Letters from Australia, he documents the poor quality civil service, the self-serving politicians and the remarkably coarse political debate. He wonders whether these new colonies would become a kakistocracy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The term kakistocracy has also been used to described the toxic mix of organised crime, self-interested oligarchs and a dysfunctional state in Russia during the Yeltsin era.’ Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AP

Early users of the term often counterpose it against aristocracy. For them, aristocracy was government by the most excellent in skills, knowledge and virtue. In contrast, kakistocracy was government by the unskilled, unknowledgeable and unvirtuous. The word was often used to castigate some of the less savoury forces unleashed by the rise of democracy. It helped to describe the anxieties about the disorder created when “the worst” took over. Often the word was all about preserving the privileges of those assumed to be “the best” (upper-class white men). But behind it was that old conservative idea that democratic revolutions don’t necessarily unleash the best in human nature, they can also unleash the worst.

The term reappeared in the 20th century, but with a different meaning. Instead of being a term used by conservatives to describe disorder, it began to be used to signify corruption. In 1944, Time magazine described the corrupt regime run by the New Jersey Democratic party boss, Frank Hague. The magazine hoped that the introduction of voting machines had “struck a blow at the very vitals of the kakistocracy” run by Hague. It resurfaced again during the Reagan years, and was then used by rightwing commentators such as Glenn Beck to attack the Obama presidency. The term has also been used to described the toxic mix of organised crime, self-interested oligarchs and a dysfunctional state in Russia during the Yeltsin era.

But it has been the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency that has driven a wider revival of use of the word. On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the economist Paul Krugman warned: “What we’re looking at, all too obviously, is an American kakistocracy.” Six months into the presidency, the political scientist Norm Ornstein documented how constant waves of scandals around the White House led him to conclude that “kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America”.

Brennan is the only the most recent in a long line of people to dust off the term to describe what he sees as a incompetent and unethical regime. During its 450-year history, kakistocracy has mainly been used by conservatives to convey their anxieties about what happens when tradition and order are upended. Today, it is being claimed by people from across the political spectrum to describe the wicked disorder that can result when expertise and ethical judgment are aggressively and systematically pushed aside.

• André Spicer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Cass Business School at City, University of London. He is the author of the book Business Bullshit