Foundational Values of the AINC

The American Integrity National Committee (AINC), as the organizational body of the Integrity Party, is bound by five immutable commitments that define its authority, constrain its actions, and sustain its legitimacy:

1. Maximization of Democratic Compatibility
   A relentless commitment to aligning party operations with the principles of representative democracy, transparent participation, and organizational pluralism. All actions must strive to improve the democratic compatibility of the party and the institutions it interacts with.
2. Continuous Application of Democratic Hardening
   An operational focus on fortifying institutional resilience against manipulation, decay, or ideological capture. Democratic Hardening ensures the party remains observable, correctable, and trusted at every layer of its structure.
3. Complete and Total Support of Civic Dignity, Civic Equality, and Civic Equity
   Every party action must preserve and advance the civic conditions through which all human dignity, rights, and agency are realized. These conditions encompass the equal and equitable capacity of all people to participate safely, meaningfully, respectfully, and dutifully in the democratic processes of society. The party cannot claim democratic legitimacy without being accountable to those affected by its actions.
4. Meaningful Feedback of Governance
   A commitment to meaningful, timely, and observable feedback on all policies, processes, and outcomes. The party must remain perpetually responsive to feedback and must understand that legitimacy is earned continuously through correction, adaptation, and public accountability.
5. Institutional Neutrality
   The Integrity Party has no predetermined ideological agenda or platform. It adopts official positions only when a policy, proposal, or condition demonstrably threatens democratic function, human dignity, or the fair participation of all within a democracy. In all other cases, the party defers to positions determined from public deliberation, free of coercive bias, as the foundation of responsible governance.

These five foundational values form the ethical and governmental frameworks of the Integrity Party. They are operational principles that define the party’s authority, its boundaries, and its moral obligations to the public. Together, they ensure that all party actions, internal and external, are rooted in democratic fidelity, institutional resilience, human dignity, civic responsiveness, and principled restraint. They encompass both the functional aspects of governance and the ethical safeguards required to prevent its abuse. As a unified framework, these values enable the Integrity Party to serve as a steward of democratic legitimacy worthy of public trust.

What These Values Mean

Democratic Compatibility

Democratic Compatibility is a framework for evaluating how political factions interact with democratic systems based on observable behavior. It does not judge ideology, popularity, or policy preferences. Instead, it protects the feedback health of democracy by identifying early signs of decay, documenting persistent threats, and recognizing genuine efforts at reform.

The AINC utilizes its own Democratic Compatibility Index (DCI) scoring. The DCI evaluates organized political factions only, never individual citizens, demographic groups, or non-political entities. Its focus is structural: how a faction accepts, processes, and responds to democratic correction, oversight, and civic input.

DCI Criteria

The Democratic Compatibility Index (DCI) is based on six criteria, each representing a potential failure of democratic health. Each criterion is evaluated by assessing how deeply and systemically that failure is present within the faction.

A faction with a low DCI exhibits one or more of these failures as persistent or defining features of its behavior or identity.

A faction with a high DCI demonstrates structures, norms, and accountability mechanisms that prevent such failures or correct them as they arise.

1. Investigative Obstruction: Does the faction interfere with or delegitimize investigations into its own behavior?
2. Internal Suppression of Dissent: Does the faction suppress internal criticism, disagreement, and pluralism of thought?
3. Institutional Delegitimization: Does the faction attack the legitimacy of democratic institutions when outcomes are unfavorable?
4. Systemic Blamewashing: Does the faction deflect accountability by invoking unrelated or past wrongdoing to justify present misconduct?
5. Outcome Disregard: Does the faction ignore or deflect the consequences of its own failed policies?
6. Public Feedback Manipulation: Does the faction manipulate public perception to make dissent illegitimate or dangerous?

Intepreting the DCI

The DCI measures how effectively a faction interacts with democracy's corrective mechanisms. A high score reflects healthy responsiveness, transparency, and pluralism. A low score indicates structural resistance to oversight, accountability, or reform. The index is meant to help factions and the public avoid drifting into populism, cronyism, or authoritarianism, each a pathway toward the collapse of the democracy in which they operate.

Maximizing Democratic Compatibility as a Foundational Value

The AINC is committed to maximizing its own Democratic Compatibility Index (DCI) score, not as a symbolic goal, but as a measurable condition of continued legitimacy. It must remain observably correctable, pluralistic, and accountable to public feedback at every level of operation. The AINC will never knowingly engage in any behavior that would warrant a low score in the criteria outlined above, and it welcomes scrutiny from the public and independent institutions to ensure that this standard is continuously met.

Democratic Hardening

Democratic Hardening is the process of reinforcing the governance frameworks of democratic institutions so they remain resilient in the face of political stressors such as corruption, manipulation, decay, or emergent crises. It does not rely on the goodwill or competence of individuals. Instead, it emphasizes the design of rules, provisions, and policies that function transparently, reliably, and accountably, even when challenged by bad actors or unforeseen crises.

Democratic Hardening treats civic participation not as a precondition for democracy, but as an emergent outcome of public trust. Society can build and control strong institutions; it cannot directly control the will or engagement of the people. But when institutions prove trustworthy, participation follows.

There is no hierarchy among the principles of Democratic Hardening. The resilience of a democratic institution and the potential for public trust are dependent on the interdependent strengthening of these principles. Inadequate hardening in one area allows for systemic unraveling of the entire institution, and the implementation of each principle must be compatible with all others to preserve democratic integrity.

Holistic Interdependence of Principles

The principles of Democratic Hardening are designed to function collectively and symbiotically. When applied in isolation or without regard for balance, individual principles may become overextended and produce harmful side effects, such as political paralysis, censorship, or surveillance. However, it is precisely through the holistic application of all principles that these risks are neutralized.

Democratic Hardening ensures that a democratic institution continues to function, and can be trusted to function, even when driven by bad actors or negligence, whether due to malice or incompetence. It does not override the foundational legal or constitutional structure of the institution in which it is applied; rather, it reinforces that structure to make it resilient under stress.

Continuous Application of Democratic Hardening as a Foundational Value

The AINC maintains Democratic Hardening as a foundational value because it adheres to the following assumption:
If a bad-faith or exclusively self-serving behavior is possible within an institution, then it is assumed to be happening.
This assumption grounds the AINC’s commitment to harden itself against capture, corruption, and illegitimate influence. The strength and fairness of the AgoraNet platform, and by extension, the legitimacy of the Integrity Party, depend entirely on the uncompromising integrity of the institution that stewards it.

Civic Dignity, Civic Equality, and Civic Equity

Civic dignity is the recognition that every person must have equal agency and protection from exclusion, intimidation, or harm that prevents them from participating safely and meaningfully in democratic life. Civic equality ensures that every individual has the same rights and opportunities to engage in the institutions and processes of democracy. Civic equity acknowledges that not all individuals begin from equal footing, and therefore processes and outreach must be adjusted to ensure meaningful inclusion in civic decision-making. Together, these principles ensure that democracy works for everyone, not only for the already empowered.

Complete and Total Support as a Foundational Value

The AINC maintains unwavering support for civic dignity, civic equality, and civic equity as conditions of democratic legitimacy. This value is operationalized through inclusive design standards for participation, dignity reviews in policy deliberation, equity-focused outreach efforts, and transparent accountability structures that flag when institutional actions have failed to uphold meaningful civic participation. The AINC does not treat dignity and equality as interests to be weighed against other goals; they are baseline conditions that must be preserved before any democratic process can claim legitimacy.

The AINC affirms that human dignity and rights are inalienable and intrinsic to all people, but they cannot be recognized, realized, or protected without proper advancement of civic dignity, civic equality, and civic equity.

Feedback Governance

Feedback Governance treats every policy and institutional action as part of an ongoing dialogue with the public. It emphasizes mechanisms for observing real-world outcomes, collecting public responses, and correcting course when needed. A system without feedback drifts toward irrelevance or oppression. Governance with meaningful feedback can self-correct, improve, and remain legitimate.

Feedback Governance borrows from principles and methods of control theory, such as control loops, inputs and outputs, error correction, observability, and controllability, and applies them to the nonlinear control problem of democratic governance. While these terms come from engineering, they are applied in a civic context: democratic institutions must continuously observe, assess, and correct themselves based on public input and real-world outcomes, just like any stable feedback system.

Meaningful Feedback of Governance as a Foundational Value

The AINC treats meaningful feedback as the lifeblood of democracy. Without the ability to observe real-world outcomes, hear from the public, and adapt accordingly, no institution can remain responsive or legitimate over time. Feedback Governance is an operational discipline rooted in technical rigor and philosophical intent.

To uphold this value, the AINC embeds feedback mechanisms throughout its infrastructure. This includes structured civic input through AgoraNet, public visibility into decision-making, and self-correcting processes that treat public response not as noise, but as signal. The AINC assumes neither itself nor the public is infallible; instead, it recognizes that legitimacy must be continuously earned through correction, adaptation, and a willingness to let future outcomes inform past decisions.

Democracy is not a static system. It is a dynamic process aimed to create a more perfect union for all. To ignore the real-time adaptability of democratic societies is to ignore one of the greatest, if not the greatest, advantages across all known forms of governance.

Institutional Neutrality

Institutional Neutrality is the disciplined refusal of a democratic institution to act as an ideological force. It means that the institution must never treat its own beliefs, agendas, or interpretations as more legitimate than the structured will of the people it serves, unless that will directly threatens democratic function, human dignity, or civic inclusion.

This neutrality is not moral indifference. It is a constitutional posture designed to prevent premature certainty, ideological drift, ideological disintegration, or institutional capture. It ensures that the institution never mistakes its own worldview for civic truth and that it remains a steward of public direction.

Institutional Neutrality is a posture of the institution, not the underlying staff. It does not require individuals within the Integrity Party to abandon personal beliefs, moral convictions, or political leanings. Instead, it binds the institution's official actions to democratic conditions, ensuring that its authority is exercised only when democratic function, human dignity, or civic inclusion are at risk. Staff may hold and express ideas freely, but the institution itself remains procedurally restrained, adopting no position unless justified by harm to the public's ability to participate in a fair and functional democracy.

Institutional Neutrality as a Foundational Value

The Integrity Party enshrines Institutional Neutrality as a foundational value to guarantee that:

• It serves as facilitator of public will, not enforcer of ideological preference.
• It protects deliberative space from manipulation by internal orthodoxy or external narratives.
• It remains open to civic discovery, even in the face of disagreement or complexity.
• It defers to public consensus, unless that consensus violates the preconditions of democracy itself.

Institutional Neutrality is what ensures that power remains procedural, not doctrinal. It disciplines the party’s external actions and policy endorsements by anchoring them not in personal belief, but in democratic consequence. The AINC must act when democracy is endangered, and when it is not, the party must step aside and let the people decide.

The AINC adopts a posture of tolerance toward beliefs, ideas, personalities, and arguments, to preserve safe and meaningful democratic function for all. This tolerance extends to all civic outcomes, provided they do not threaten democratic function, human dignity, or the fair participation of anyone within this democracy.

Is the Integrity Party the right party for you?

The Integrity Party may seem unusual. It doesn’t adopt a traditional ideology or platform. Instead, it’s built around values that protect the functioning of democracy, rather than pushing predetermined outcomes. The AINC recognizes that this may feel strange, even frustrating. After all, how do you stand behind something that doesn’t appear to stand for anything?

But the truth is, the AINC does stand for something. Its mission is to return power to the people in a more meaningful way than has ever been achieved. To do that, it cannot become like other parties. It must do more than promise that outcome; it must show that the outcome is embedded in every value the Integrity Party is built upon.

You might feel at home in the Integrity Party if you believe:

• Democracy should work even when the people in charge don't.
• No party should claim moral supremacy, only accountability.
• Policy outcomes matter, but process legitimacy matters more.
• Human dignity and civic equality should be non-negotiable.
• Political parties should be disbanded if they lose the public’s trust.

The Integrity Party may not be for you if:

• You believe your preferred ideology should guide all outcomes, regardless of public feedback.
• You want a party that imposes predetermined positions with little or no public input.
• You believe winning is more important than legitimacy or efficacy.
• You prefer loyalty to a faction over correction through public input.

The success of the Integrity Party is predicated on participation and public input, not belief or loyalty. AgoraNet is open to everyone, and every voice is considered in its outcomes. And this participation matters more than ever in a political era dominated by bad-faith actors, institutional decay, and deliberate public manipulation.

If the Integrity Party speaks to something you've been waiting for, consider contributing, even a little, to help us finish the work. We exist to end the Bad-Faith Equilibrium plaguing our society.