Opinion | Overuse of ‘existential threat’ is a crisis of existential proportions

Exceedingly rare in American English before the 21st century, “existential threat” has achieved full-blown cliche status since then, its usage surpassing the equally serviceable but less highfalutin “potential disaster,” according to Google’s Ngram viewer tool, which measures how frequently words and phrases cropped up in books since 1800.

Everyone from Joe Biden to Joe Rogan has called former president Donald Trump an “existential threat” — whether to “America” (Biden), “democracy” (Rogan) or something else. Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been branded a potential ET to — pretty much everything. Elsewhere, the nonprofit workforce has been said to face an existential threat from “five layers of crisis,” including a lack of funding; Israeli ultraright politician Bezalel Smotrich accused certain human rights organizations of posing an “existential threat to the state of Israel.”

The ET boom helped make “existential” Dictionary.com’s “Word of the Year” for 2019, and the timing suggests its growth was propelled by a widespread groping for stronger words to describe menaces such as terrorism and climate change.

So it was probably inevitable that the chief economist of Bank of the West would announce that a failure to raise the debt limit, as opposed to additional Fed interest rate hikes, represents the “true existential threat facing the economic outlook.”

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) has called the debt limit extension bill that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) barely steered through the House a way to force McCarthy and the president “to sit down and deal with an existential threat.”

If a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, then by all means let us use the present one to swear off this hollow, hackneyed phrase, which is not only redundant but also pretentious — and not particularly easy to pronounce or spell, either.

A world without ET would be a world in which consumers of journalism and political speeches would feel slightly less like they are being harangued and slightly more like they are being persuaded.

To label something a threat or a risk or a danger, without using the bombastic e-word as a verbal crutch, would encourage those who issue warnings to be specific and those who receive them to be deliberate. And no matter how serious an impending problem might be, freaking out does not make it easier to solve.

Of course, “existential threat” has its defenders. Noticing the hot ET trend in 2019, linguist John McWhorter of Columbia University celebrated it, in the Atlantic, as a benign example of English’s adaptation to the ever-changing demands of its speakers. “Existential threat,” he argued, meets a need “to move, stimulate, and hold the attention of those we talk (or write) to, and this requires the constant renewal of words designed to grab the lapels and register our sincerity and passion.”

Fair enough. Also fair would be an observant reader’s observation — regarding this column — that complaining about the redundancy or hackishness of “existential threat” is itself not original.

Via Google, we discover that other curmudgeons who have previously raised the issue include one Bernard Leslie; he is a self-described “beekeeping expert who lives beside Kentucky Lake in the northeast corner of Henry County,” in Tennessee, and writes a column — “An Old Man’s Reflections” — for the local Paris Post-Intelligencer newspaper. “Existential threat,” Mr. Leslie lamented last year, has become the political equivalent of “crying wolf.”

Some threats that people call “existential” are indeed pretty dangerous. Trump’s rise in 2016 was not “an extinction-level event” for U.S. democracy, as New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan vividly wrote at the time. Yet whether in 2024 the political system could withstand another election win for the intellectual author of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot — especially without a popular-vote majority — is an open question.

Still, distinguishing among threats is one of the skills we’ll need to make it through. Democracies require a constant balance between mobilizing people for necessary change and sustaining a consensus behind what already works. Public opinion struggles endlessly for a happy medium between alarmism and complacency. The language that politicians and pundits use can help people make intelligent choices — or not.

Overuse of “existential threat” has probably not reached the point of semantic satiation, which is the well-documented but incompletely understood psychological phenomenon whereby words seem to lose meaning through rapid, frequent repetition, until listeners start to hear them as “blah-blah-blah.” But it’s worth remembering that such a thing is possible.