The Presidential We
Pronoun preferences can elicit wildly different responses from each side of the American culture wars. Yet one category of pronouns is arguably more powerful and influential than those tucked away in email signatures: first-person plural pronouns. Especially when heads of state get their hands on it.
The royal we once signaled monarchs’ divine authority: God would send important messages directly to the king, who relayed this heavenly message through his edicts. But it’s not just the British royalty who use these politically charged pronouns; the United States was founded on the word we. Few words are as iconically American as the first three words of the Preamble: “We the People.” Even when casting off the shackles of the British monarchy, the Founding Fathers couldn’t shake the crown’s linguistic style.Â
And few American institutions abuse the word we as much as the American presidency.Â
The Presidential We
Instead of the royal we, Americans have long endured the presidential we. American history brims with executive overuse of first-person personal pronouns. Whether it’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt pitching the New Deal (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or an inexperienced Barack Obama inspiring young voters (“Yes, we can”), presidents frequently invoke plural pronouns to craft a narrative and broaden their appeal.
Abraham Lincoln—who celebrated his election by telling his wife “we are elected”—was one of the first presidents to leverage the presidential we. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, the word appears more than 12,000 times. Lincoln’s “rhetorical substitution of the plural for the singular pronoun” was unprecedented—”as no political leader had done before him”—argued Peter Field, head of the University of Canterbury’s School of Humanities, in a 2011 paper for the journal American Nineteenth Century History. Lincoln’s preference for the presidential we “enabled his political ascendency in the 1850s and sustained his presidency during the war,” claimed Field.
A century and a half later, the presidential we is abundant. Biden, in particular, loves the presidential we. During his 2021 inaugural address, Scranton Joe used 105 first-personal plural pronouns, 89 of which were we. In George Washington, by contrast, used only two in his first inaugural speech.
In fact, the presidential we is on the rise. By measuring first-personal plurals as a percentage of the overall word count, the presidential we in inaugural addresses—as expressed with the first-person pronoun percentage (FPPP)—has steadily increased over 57 presidential terms:
Before 1905, the FPPP was, on average, 0.6 percent. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt more than quadrupled the FPPP to 4.1 percent. Since then, the average has been 3.1 percent. Other peaks include FDR’s final address (4.8 percent), both of Nixon’s speeches (3.9 percent in 1969 and 4.1 percent in 1973), Bill Clinton’s first (3.9 percent), George W. Bush’s first (5.8 percent), and Biden’s only (4.4 percent).Â
Research suggests that those who overuse first-person pronouns tend to demonstrate two qualities: They are usually powerful, and they are usually lying.
We’ve Done the Research—and We Know You’re Lying
In a 2013 paper for the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, a research team—James W. Pennebaker, Ewa Kacewicz, Matthew Davis, Moongee Jeon, and Arthur C. Graesser—examined how people use first-
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