The Mission

What the IPA is

The Independent Parties of America is proposed as a truly independent party in American politics. Its foundation is the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, held as the highest law of the land and as the shared property of every faction within it. Its method is a body of practice called holistic management, adapted from the working landscape to the way people govern themselves.

Its one requirement to run is not wealth, family name, or famous backers. It is authorship: to run on the IPA ticket, you must have helped write your community's own statement of how it wants to live.

The Constitution is the load-bearing wall

Most new movements treat the founding documents as scenery, invoked at rallies and ignored in practice. The IPA does the opposite: it makes them the load-bearing wall. Every candidate, before signing off on any policy or voting for anyone else's, is responsible for checking that the measure sits inside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It is the party's answer to the deepest fear in American political life, which is that the rules themselves will be bent by whoever holds temporary power. A party that makes loyalty to the Constitution a candidate's personal, published duty has chosen its referee before the game begins.

The community writes the context

Everything in the IPA rests on a single document, written locally, owned locally, and tested endlessly: the community holistic context. It is a declaration of how the people living in a community want their lives to be. Not a policy platform. Not a wish list. Not a list of complaints. A description, in plain words, of the life a community intends to have, written carefully enough to steer every decision that follows it.

A proper context answers three questions, and only three, in the order given:

1. How do the people want their lives to be, based on what they value most: in their culture, in their daily needs, and in their spirit.
2. What has to be produced, and what must people do, to live such lives.
3. What must the resource base, the land, the water, the air, the soil itself, look like hundreds of years from now so that people then can still live such lives.

Notice what is missing: any candidate, any party, any policy. A context is written as if the election had not happened yet, because its job is to judge the election.

Seven questions and a fail-safe

A context without a testing process is a wish. Seven questions, asked in order, test every policy a candidate would create and every policy a candidate is asked to vote for. They come to politics from the working landscape, where they have been tested for four decades. Their virtue is that they are hard to fool: an answer that sounds good usually fails one of the seven. The questions are public property. Any voter can run them.

Every policy then carries a fail-safe clause written in advance: the moment an unintended negative consequence is confirmed, the policy is void and must be re-debated from scratch, in public.

What the mission is building

Founding circles in communities that write their own context and register it on the public record. Candidates who carry that context to the next table up: city, county, state, nation. Ballot access in all fifty states, done patiently through each state's own rulebook, because no permission is required and no permission was ever required.