In psql:
it=> show lc_collate;
 lc_collate
-------------
 en_US.UTF-8

An alternative I got from a google search is to do

SELECT _name from _keyword WHERE __retired__=0 ORDER BY convert_to(_name, 
'SQL_ASCII');

or

SELECT _name from _keyword WHERE __retired__=0 ORDER BY convert_to(_name, 
'latin1');

Another not-so-good alternative is to add an _order column to the _keyword 
class and do the sort manually.

I ended putting digits in front of the 3 keywords I wanted at the top:

 1 Monthly Maintenance
 2 Routine Maintenance
 3 Troubleshooting
 ATAF
 App Development
...

A possible fix is to do something similar to what I did for issue 2550805. 
Change the 'order by' code in Class._filter_sql in 
backends/rdbms_common.py (near line 2265) and add a special case for 
backends/back_postgresql.py. I'm not sure what the Postgres special case 
would be that would correctly handle encodings for other languages. Doing 
a convert_to using SQL_ASCII or latin1 is definitely not correct.