Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Opinion – Healing and uniting America … analysis of the rhetorical devices in President Joe Biden inauguration 

Home National Opinion – Healing and uniting America … analysis of the rhetorical devices in President Joe Biden inauguration 
Opinion – Healing and uniting America … analysis of the rhetorical devices in President Joe Biden inauguration 

As it has become customary for me to look at the rhetorical devices used in an inaugural address, as I did with Presidents Pohamba and Geingob speeches but also with Obama, I want to do the same with President Joe Biden’s inaugural speech. 

Indeed, using well known rhetorical tools, America’s 46th President, Joe Biden’s inaugural speech gave his country a sense of hope they had been waiting for. “Together we shall write an American story of hope not of fear,” he told his country. 

The repeated theme of unity was the core of his address, most of which was aimed at healing a divided America. “Let’s start afresh, all of us. Let’s start to listen to one another again, hear one another… Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war,” he said.
Strikingly he did not mention Donald Trump but there was an olive branch to his voters. “To all those who did not support this, let me say this: Hear me out as we move forward, take a measure of me and my heart,” said Biden. “If we still disagree, so be it, that’s democracy, that’s America.” 

That was the offer for Americans, but hugely important messages for the world were also woven into his intricate address. “We will repair our alliances…we will lead not by the example of our power but the power of our example,” he said.

This was his signal that Biden’s America will reverse the withdrawal from the world cooperation that Trumpism emblemised, such as from the Paris accord on the environment. Biden spoke of “the cry for survival that comes from the planet itself. A cry that cannot be any more desperate or any clearer”. That signals an early re-joining of the Paris accord by Washington. Biden also dwelled on the coronavirus pandemic, leading a brief silence for the Americans lost to the disease. 

Joe Biden’s inaugural address was well-written with powerful rhetorical flourishes and inspiring themes. In collaboration with his speechwriters and historian Jon Meacham, Biden wrote and delivered a speech that will inspire many of those who read or watched it. A great speech needs a unifying theme that is clear and plainly spoken. Biden wasted no time in getting to the point. “The American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us,” he said. To overcome the challenges that America faces and to “restore the soul of America,” Biden said, requires more than words. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.” And as I have stated before, that was the theme of his speech. 

Biden used the word “unity” eight times in his 21-minute speech and cited historical figures like St. Augustine and Abraham Lincoln to reinforce his theme.

“In another January on New Year’s Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper the president said, and I quote, ‘if my name ever goes down in history, it’ll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it’. My whole soul is in it today, on this January day.  Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. “Alliteration, repeating letters or sounds in close succession, is a rhetorical tool that requires strong writing to convey ideas. When it works, it adds to the power of a message. Biden said: “This is a time of testing. We face an attack on our democracy and on truth. A raging virus, growing inequities, the sting of systemic racism, a climate in crisis…we will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era.” 

One can tell when a speechwriter has a hand in a sentence when you see juxtaposition, highlighting the differences between two ideas. For example, in Biden’s speech, he said: “We have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities. “Together we will write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity not division, of light, not darkness.”

Repetition adds weight to an idea. The writing tool of repetition is called anaphora. It happens when the same words start a series of sentences. Biden said, “Here we stand in the shadow of the Capitol dome, completed amid the Civil War when the union itself was literally hanging in the balance. Yet we endured. We prevailed. And here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of this democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground. It did not happen. It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever. “This series of repeated sentences garnered a loud and sustained applause. People like to be reminded of who they are. Biden did so in several sections of his speech. Americans, Biden reminded his listeners, are “restless, bold, and optimistic.” 

“This is a great nation,” Biden continued. “We are good people. And over the centuries, through storm and strife, in peace and war, we’ve come so far…Through civil war, the Great Depression, world war, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice and setbacks, our better angels have always prevailed.” “Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we are in now,” Biden said. Indeed, Biden (78) is taking office at as grim a moment as many Americans can remember, and his inaugural celebration reflected that reality. 

Historians have put the challenges Biden faces on par with, or even beyond, what confronted Abraham Lincoln when he was inaugurated in 1861 to lead a nation splintering into civil war or Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he was sworn in during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933. But Lincoln and Roosevelt’s presidencies are also a blueprint for the ways American leaders have turned crises into opportunities, pulling people past the partisan divisions or ideological forces that can halt progress. Biden said America faces a historic moment of crisis and challenge. “Unity is the path forward,” he added. We don’t know what the next chapter of America’s story will read, but  Biden made it clear that he hopes unity is the headline. Standing on the same Capitol steps where just two weeks ago violent rioters laid siege to the nation’s democracy, Biden’s words felt less like rhetorical flourishes and more like an urgent appeal to stabilize a country reeling from a spiralling pandemic, economic uncertainty, racial tensions and a growing divide over truth versus lies. “We must end this uncivil war,” Biden declared.
Repairing the badly battered nation amounts to one of the greatest challenges to face an American president and the insurrection at the Capitol made clear the extent of the risks posed by the nation’s deep political divisions and the embrace of conspiracies and lies by many followers of Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump.

For the first time in modern history, the new president’s successor was not sitting within arm’s reach on the west front of the Capitol. Biden did not mention Trump but gave an appreciative nod at Vice President Mike Pence, who attended. 
Trump has caused thousands of children to be interned in inhumane conditions. He has insulted and alienated friends and allies to America. He has cosied up to right-wing nationalists. He has rejected the American presidential tradition of seeking unity and instead has indulged in the politics of division. He has transformed the White House into the world capital of ignorance and misinformation by reciting verifiable falsehoods. 
He has been a particular antagonist seeking to undermine forward-looking policies on auto emissions and environmental preservation. He has denied the existential challenge of climate change.

He has made the United States unreliable, erratic and foolish in international affairs by disparaging its diplomatic corps, engaging in frequent and jarring changes in foreign affairs and defence advisors. He has reduced or eliminated independent science advisory panels in a quest to remove fact from policymaking when it collides with damaging policies he wishes to pursue. 

He has demeaned the presidency with foul, angry language hurled at his political adversaries, replacing fireside chats and presidential addresses with cable-TV-fueled, stream-of-consciousness tweets that attacked his critics and stoke fear and outrage in his supporters.
 He has sullied the office of the presidency by using it to express his contempt for people he does not like or who do not support him. The most egregious example may be his treatment of the late Sen. John McCain, even after McCain’s passing. 

He has appealed to the basest part of America’s culture, lifting into the mainstream chords and currents of racism. He put in place a program to deny visas to visitors from majority Muslim nations. He disparaged Latinos; called Haiti, El Salvador and African nations “shithole countries”. More than any president in living memory, Trump has cheapened his office, instilled distrust in essential institutions and replaced knowledge and professionalism with ignorance and amateurism. 

There are hard lessons to be learnt here. That as Trump, some leaders can be divisive and self-serving, but one should not lead with revenge politics to divide but with the politics of healing and uniting the nation. This is what Amanda Gorman, America’s first-ever youth poet laureate, said when she challenged Americans to unify and “leave behind a country better than the one we were left” as she delivered a stirring inauguration poem entitled, “The Hill We Climb.” We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,” the 22-year-old Gorman said, a reference to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. “And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” “The new dawn blooms as we free it,” she concluded the poem. “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it if only we’re brave enough to be it.” Indeed, a new dawn blooms and let us be brave enough to see and be the light.