As President Joe Biden prepares for Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he should go back to an old-style approach of using it for unifying purposes, not for partisan talking points.

The union’s politics desperately need bipartisanship, common ground, and common courtesy. Civility, even. The Chinese spy balloon last week should remind us we live in a dangerous world with aggressive adversaries, and that we therefore need to find some way to pull together.

Instead, the political atmosphere is poisonous. The House ex-Speaker’s husband was beaten nearly to death with a hammer; the current House Majority Leader survived an assassination attempt when medical attention just one minute later would have resulted in his death. Supreme Court justices have would-be assassins show up on their block and other louts harass them at restaurants. Senators get assaulted by neighbors and then nearly assaulted again, with their wives , when leaving White House events. A congresswoman urges her supporters to heckle Cabinet members to force them from public establishments.

And, of course, a president defeated for re-election inspired a mob to break into the U.S. Capitol, injuring more than 140 officers of the law, all while many rioters yelled for the Speaker and the vice president to be executed.

Meanwhile, on grave matters of substance, nothing gets done. The national debt is at the most dangerous level in U.S. history. Social Security and Medicare effectively face bankruptcy as their unfunded liabilities rise into the many tens of trillions of dollars. Our Navy is too small for the challenges it might face, while shortfalls grow in personnel and equipment across all armed services, all as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others pose serious threats and as Latin America becomes increasingly unstable.

If there is any time to appeal to our better angels, this is it. President Biden already has achieved his massive expansion of government and continues to appoint decidedly leftist judges. He still has in place political appointees throughout government to manage agencies with liberal interpretations. With all those things in place, he can afford on several key fronts to pivot away from an aggressively ideological wish list and towards true compromise.

Biden should begin his speech by explicitly calling for a lower political temperature — and then follow up by providing substance, not just lip service.

He could call for a bipartisan commission on Social Security, Medicare, and debt. He could call for a truce on inserting the federal government any further into hot-button social issues and let states decide their own best policies, while reserving his own right to advocate — but not force upon anyone — his own views. He could offer at least rhetorical condemnation of vandalism and fire-bombing of pro-life pregnancy resource centers, thus demonstrating that he wants to protect the rights, properties and lives of “the other side” as much as he wants to protect his own side.

Biden could order a thorough review of, and ethics retraining resulting from, FBI procedural abuses identified by the FBI’s own internal audit showing 747 examples of FBI agents breaking their own rules in just 18 months of high-profile investigations alone. (Imagine how much abuse exists in probes where the public isn’t watching as closely!)

The point would be to show, at little cost to Biden, that he appreciates unambiguously legitimate concerns from conservatives that they suffer from double standards of justice and enforcement priorities.

Those are just a few illustrative examples. Biden needs to find those ways, and more, to show that some things are more important that raw ideology. He must re-establish faith in constitutional government. He must do it now.