My fellow Americans, I, Joseph R. Biden, humbly stand with you as the 46th President of the United States.
I say “stand with you” because I firmly believe that as president my role is not to be above you, but to walk alongside each and every one of you as we work to make a more perfect union.
It is a goal that will never be fully attainable. We are an imperfect union, made up of flaws and imperfections. I know that’s not popular to say, but it’s true. And yet we still strive to be better than the generation before us. To learn from the mistakes of our mothers and our fathers.
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We may never completely wipe away the stains of our complicated history, but we can and should aim to be better than we were yesterday.
That is why I stand before you and declare that unlike our friends in Ukraine, currently fighting for the independence, or the people of Russia, suffering under the control of a despot, the state of our union is still controlled by the people who elect each and every one of us. The American people.
As Russia has witnessed, strength does not merely come from tanks and soldiers. Strength comes from dedication to purpose and the commitment to something greater than yourself. That’s what the leader of Russia misunderstood when he invaded Ukraine and attempted to unleash hell on a sovereign nation.
There are those in the world who believe that bullying signifies strength. They believe that aggression is brave and striving for peace is weak. They couldn’t be more wrong. It’s easy to drop bombs, it’s far more difficult to sit across from your adversary and negotiate a peaceful resolution.
Vladimir Putin is a strongman whose repeated aggression only proves his essential weakness. His aim, he says, is to restore the former Soviet Union to “glory.” Well, let me be clear, the Soviet Union is a chapter of history that will never be reopened. Not because the United States says so, or any other country says so. The Soviet Union is dead because the people who lived under that dictatorship’s brutality and corruption say so.
It is no accident that after years of receiving praise from our former president, Putin feels not just emboldened, but justified in his attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government in Ukraine.
The U.S. influences the rest of the world, for better and for worse. That includes Putin. He saw the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the Republican support for my predecessor’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Putin saw the vulnerability of American democracy.
While we can not let lies be mistaken for truth, we must work to come to a place where Americans can disagree, passionately, while peacefully coexisting. That’s what a healthy democracy requires.
What will erode, and eventually destroy, a democracy like ours are people in power embracing lies and cynically exploiting cultural divisions for political gains. We must be able to see the trappings of conmen and profiteers for what they are, attempts to exploit the most vulnerable for economic gain. But most importantly, we must be clear-eyed and forthright when talking about who we are as a country and what our values are as a people.
At this very moment, all over this great nation, millions of Americans are struggling to keep a roof over their head or food in their children’s stomachs. Health care and higher education are out of reach for far too many, regardless of political affiliation, through no fault of their own, all while wealth continues to concentrate in the pockets of a small group of individuals.
While we celebrate American ingenuity and commend titans of industry, we must also look out for our own. As President Abraham Lincoln famously said: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities.”
This moment in our nation's history poses an opportunity for Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else.
Rather than continuing to fight the same battles against ourselves, we can deploy our energy toward helping families in West Virginia, as well as families in Baltimore. We have an opportunity to lift up communities in Iowa, as well as Atlanta.
We cannot continue to view each other as merely Democrats or Republicans, or define our most important issues through rigid partisan lenses. Rather, we must address the problems that plague our nation as American problems. When a child goes hungry, he isn’t a Democrat or Republican, he is evidence that we have failed to live up to our obligation. When a worker loses his or her job and can’t cover the expenses for their medicine, they aren’t a Democratic or Republican patient, they are an example of our broken health-care system.
No one should be naive enough to think that the ill will between both sides will heal overnight, but if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s that we cannot continue down this path and expect any good to come out of it. We the people, each and every one of us, have been entrusted with the responsibility to defend our democracy through not just our actions, but our words. Yes, words do matter. How we treat each other matters. What kind of country and what kind of world we leave to the next generation matters.
There are people who believe that a person’s value is defined solely by how much money they can accrue. We should reject that belief. What defines a person is what they’re willing to do for someone who can’t do anything for them in return. We can each be that person, who helps those in need only because it’s the right thing to do.
The State of our Union may be strong, but it is not invincible.
When leaders in Washington start to believe that they’re more powerful than the citizens who elect us, we are weaker for it. When leaders in Washington start to believe that they are beholden to corporations and donors, not the American people who grant us our power, we are weaker for it. And when leaders in Washington start to believe that they alone represent the will of the people, rather than working to improve the lives of the average American, we are weaker for it.
Now is the time for America to boldly live up to its values. We must remind our fellow Americans that while our flame may have flickered, we will never allow our beacon to be extinguished. The world will notice, and be inspired.
We are now and will forever be the United States of America, a home to freedom, opportunity, and the pursuit of dreams. That is the State of our Union.
