Empathy, Unity, and Institutional Norms: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Joe Biden's Presidential Rhetoric (2020–2024)

Abstract

This research investigates the presidential discourse of three recurring elements, empathy, unity and the protection of institutional norms, in the discourse of Joseph R. Biden Jr. With the technical support of Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis, Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach to ideology, and an operationalised version of Charteris-Black's critical metaphor analysis, the paper examines the lexicogrammatical and rhetorical construction of these themes in a purposively selected corpus of major addresses delivered during the period from 2021 to January 2025, the date of Obama's final address. The corpus includes his 2021 Inaugural Address, the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan speech, the January 2022 anniversary message on the January 6th attack on the Capitol, the September 2022 “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech and the January 2025 farewell speech. The analysis demonstrates the rhetorical nature of empathy as a rhetorical ethos based on personal biographical narratives, but it is not equally present in all genres of the presidential speech, as evidenced in a shift from zero to 13 explicit ‘namings of an out-group' in two presidential addresses, where ‘us versus them' is a rhetorical device that is increasingly used and consistent with the rhetorical ideological square described by van Dijk; and the rhetorical nature of unity as a rhetorical master frame, which despite its seemingly inclusive character, actually relies on an implicit and later explicit ‘us versus them' polarization as described by van Dijk, and this is concretely demonstrated by a shift in the number of ‘namings of an out-group' from zero to 13 across two presidential addresses, and through the presence of a figurative repertoire of soul, flame and sacred space metaphors that repeatedly brings the speaker's political position to the fore in the discourses of institutional norms. The study holds that the three themes don't exist in isolation but are actually part of a unified ideological package of moral ethos, collective identity, and procedural legitimacy. Finally, it places the results of this paper in the broader context of the literature on Biden's rhetoric and mentions the limitations of a purposively sampled corpus of texts.