Despite being a people who fought a revolutionary war to overthrow a king, Americans remain devoted to the ceremonial trappings of monarchy. The annual State of the Union speech, for example, has the air of a British speech from the throne, yet nothing really compares to the monarchical celebration of a presidential inauguration. Every 20 January following an election, hundreds of thousands of people gather to witness the swearing in of the victor. The president-elect is joined on stage by fellow politicians – usually including, if it’s a new president, the incumbent. Led in the proceedings by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the president places his hand on a Bible, swears an oath to uphold the constitution, and then delivers an address setting out his beliefs and political agenda. There are parades, processions, and other celebrations, and the evening finishes with the most exclusive affair in any presidency: the inaugural ball. The occasion’s majesty is intended to be overwhelming, and it is.

Its ceremonial trappings may befit a king, but a presidential inauguration’s purpose is to celebrate – and rekindle – the spirit of democracy. Presidents routinely marvel at the peaceful transition of power that has remained unbroken since George Washington first took office in 1789. They are right to do so; for all the turbulence the United States has endured in its history, it is unusually consistent in the consistency of its democratic practices and procedures.

Inaugural addresses have given us some of the most memorable phrases ever used in political rhetoric. In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln appealed to Americans’ ‘mystic chords of memory’ and ‘the better angels of our nature’. In 1933, in the deepest depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt assured Americans that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. In 1961, at the height of the crisis years of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy told Americans they should ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’, and vowed they would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty’.

Perhaps the most appropriate inaugural addresses today are the two delivered by Ronald Reagan, in 1981 after he defeated Jimmy Carter and in 1985 after he won one of the biggest triumphs in American electoral history. Reading these speeches in 2025 reminds us how little the basic issues roiling the United States have changed in the past four decades. Americans are still grappling with the profound social and cultural forces and traumatic changes unleashed by the 1960s and 1970s.

It was unseasonably warm on 20 January 1981, and the crowd facing Reagan was unusually large. He spoke from the top of the steps on the Capitol’s West Front, facing ‘a magnificent vista’ of ‘special beauty’ down the National Mall towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Reagan was actually the first president to speak from this spot; his predecessors spoke from the East Portico, where the surroundings weren’t quite as magisterial and the crowds were smaller. Reagan noted that the ‘solemn’ and ‘momentous occasion’ of peacefully transferring power was ‘nothing less than a miracle’. It showed ‘a watching world that we are a united people’.

Despite the clear mandate he had received, Reagan was putting an exaggerated gloss on the shine of his lopsided victory over Carter. Americans in 1981 were hardly a united people. Reagan was a polarising figure even within his own party, feared as well as admired and hated as well as loved, as many Americans saw him as an extremist. His campaign rhetoric, which leaned in to the strongly anti-communist and anti-government ideology that was coming to dominate the Republican Party, struck many as dangerous, and many Americans feared for the future of the New Deal, Great Society, civil rights, and world peace.

Mario Cuomo once observed that the best American politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. As Max Boot has brilliantly illustrated in his recent biography, Reagan’s great strength was to intuitively channel this wisdom. In his first act as president – the inaugural address – Reagan sought to strike a balance between setting out his conservative agenda while reassuring his listeners that he had all Americans in mind. He sounded a strongly populist note, telling Americans that government had become too elitist, too removed from the people. In the most famous line of the address, Reagan charged that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. This general crisis of the state had caused high unemployment, inefficient government agencies, excessively high taxation, and, most dangerous of all, persistent inflation.

Be it from the left or the right, populist movements are grounded in a sense that the people are being taken advantage of by the elite. Because the people embody the nation, elites who betray the people also, by definition, betray the nation. This is where populist movements’ nationalism comes from, as well as their anger. Reagan tapped into both nationalism and anger, although his genius was to do so without sounding angry. He simply promised to restore to the American people – he collectively called them ‘heroes’, these ‘citizens of this blessed land’ – what they were entitled to, which in turn would make them once again proud to be Americans after the humiliations of the Vietnam War and the Iran hostage crisis. ‘We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth.’

The weather four years later, in January 1985, was very different. An historic cold front brought the daytime high temperature up to just -14C, too cold for a parade with marching bands or even an outdoor speech. Reagan instead spoke from inside the Capitol, standing under the Rotunda (where his opponent in 1980, Jimmy Carter, recently lay in state before his funeral on 9 January 2025). That hasn’t happened again until this year, when a cold snap will force Donald Trump to speak indoors, under the Rotunda.

In 1980, Reagan had campaigned on the eye-catching slogan of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’, and he wanted to use his second inaugural address to remind Americans how he had lived up to the promises he had made in the ‘New Beginning’ his presidency represented: a booming economy, rejuvenated world leadership based on peace through strength, and a government that was more responsive to the needs of its people. But Reagan said he wouldn’t rest on his achievements. ‘My fellow citizens’, he promised at the outset of his second term, ‘our nation is poised for greatness… not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.’

It will be interesting to see which themes Donald Trump highlights, and which tone he strikes, when he delivers his second inaugural address. He is in many ways the heir to Reagan’s mantle: a free-market, small-government conservative who has also vowed to ‘make America great again’. But Trump’s populism has had a darker undercurrent than Reagan’s, more ‘American carnage’ and ‘America first’, as he put it in his first inaugural address, than a sunnily optimistic ‘American dream’ or ‘New Beginning’. Perhaps that reflects the tenor of our exhausting, frazzled times, more than four decades on from the dawn of the same crisis in which we remain trapped. Either way, one thing is certain: the inauguration ceremonies this year will not be short on pomp and circumstance.