“This Is a Great Nation, and We are a Good People”: President Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address and Attitude of Empathy

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the middle of a global pandemic, days after an attempted insurrection, and in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, President Biden spoke of his desire to restore the soul of America in his inaugural address. I argue that Biden’s address rhetorically constituted a civic attitude of empathy by speaking of values that unite Americans, as well as rejecting the anti-deliberative rhetoric of former President Trump. To model a civic attitude of empathy, Biden embraced five shared values: 1) American democratic principles of goodwill, 2) the respect for dissent, 3) focusing on the future, 4) neighborliness to one’s fellow citizen, and 5) the rejection of resentment and intransigence. An attitudinal shift may be a long-term project, but Biden’s speech modeled how Americans could ideally begin to engage in future ethical deliberation at a time when citizens could not even agree on basic facts.