The Analysis of American Dream on Joe Biden's Victory Speech in USA Presidential Election 2020: Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

manities, Universitas Jember. CDA is the study of the language used to reveal how the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality, and bias are maintained in the social, political, and historical context. Thus, a political speech of the president is one of the discourse in the political context. The example is the victory speech delivered by Joe Biden on November 7, 2020. This speech is selected as the research object in order to examine how power and dominance are maintained in this context. The first research objective is to scrutinize the linguistic features and the intentions in Joe Biden's victory speech. Secondly, it aims to prove how the American Dream manifested in Joe Biden's victory speech. The third purpose is to reveal the reason for using the American Dream by exploring the context at that time.This research uses Van Dijk’s CDA approach to reach the research objectives. This research uses qualitative methods and descriptive techniques to describe and analyze data. The Stages of documentation technique (Blaxter and Tight, 1996:141) are used to conduct the data collection. The steps are download and reading the script, then coding and classifying the data. The data analysis steps are identifying the data based on Van Dijk’s CDA stages, classifying and analyzing the data, then making a conclusion. The first is text analysis stage. Macrostructure results show there are 4 data which consist of themes and subthemes in this speech. Superstructure results show there are 18 data which consist of opening, intentions, persuasions, goals, and closing. Then, microstructure results show 468 data which consist of syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, stylistic style, and rhetoric acts. Secondly, this research found 8 data of socio-cognitive elements; motional attachment, mind control, mitigating evidence, glorification of US, and the liberal ideology of victory speech. The last, this research concludes that the US condition in the presidential election 2020 is related to the reason for using American Dream in the speech.