Introduction: The Values Vacuum
American democracy has a fundamental problem: we make political decisions without agreeing on the values that guide those choices. When we lack clear principles, special interests take advantage. They advance their own agendas—maximizing profits, gaining power, avoiding accountability—that serve their narrow interests. Democratic decisions advance the nation’s interests by protecting individual liberty and building collective prosperity and security.
This capture by special interests has already happened. Financial deregulation led to the 2008 crisis that may have been the largest transfer of wealth in American history, destroying huge parts of the American middle class while those properties and assets ended up in the hands of wealthy investors. Insurance company lobbyists write healthcare policies. Fossil fuel companies block climate action through regulatory capture, and we are seeing the severe effects of global warming every day. Climate events are intensifying with documented economic costs, creating long-term challenges that require the kind of evidence-based, intergenerational planning that democracy should excel at. Tax policies shift burdens from corporations to individuals. This organized exploitation has transferred massive wealth upward, gutted the middle class, and created widespread economic insecurity and political anger. Special interests manipulate democracy’s vulnerabilities by exploiting our unclear principles.
Democracy is a values-based system of government, enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. When citizens share clear principles about what constitutes good decisions, democratic institutions function effectively. When citizens haven’t explicitly identified and agreed on their democratic values, special interests can exploit that confusion to advance their own agendas.
This article presents 33 core values organized into six categories. These values emerge from democratic theory and practice. I offer them as my contribution to the ongoing national conversation about what principles should guide American decision-making. Rather than prescribing outcomes, this framework helps citizens recognize the values already embedded in democratic institutions, identify their own priorities among these principles, and engage in political discourse based on explicit reasoning rather than partisan positioning.
Restoring values-based navigation to democratic decision-making provides essential protection against special interests who have gained excessive power by exploiting our unclear principles.
Why Values Matter in Democracy
Democracy requires a shared understanding of what makes decisions legitimate. When we operate without an explicit framework, we allow opportunities for manipulation by those who benefit from the confusion.
How Unclear Values Enable Capture
Consider how the lack of a framework enables capture. Regulatory capture occurs when special interests gain control over the agencies or processes that are supposed to regulate them. A lobbyist argues for deregulation using “freedom” rhetoric. A politician promises “efficiency.” Interest groups invoke “fairness.”
Without explicit standards, these deceptive appeals work because citizens have no criteria for determining whether policies actually serve democratic purposes. Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings gave corporations many important rights of citizens without the responsibilities. Corporations can’t be jailed, don’t die, and don’t live in the communities affected by their political spending.
This manipulation has contributed to Americans living in completely different realities about the same events, making productive democratic dialogue nearly impossible.
The Protection Values-Based Decision Making Provides
Values-based decision making provides protection against this manipulation. It requires explicit reasoning about principles and forces government to work with actual facts and outcomes rather than empty rhetoric.
What evidence supports this policy? Who pays the costs and gets the benefits? How does this choice affect human dignity and equal treatment? What are the long-term consequences for democratic institutions?
These questions expose manipulation and focus attention on outcomes that serve the common good.
Historical Examples: Strong vs. Weak Values Frameworks
History demonstrates the difference between strong and weak values frameworks. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded partly because it articulated clear principles—equal treatment, human dignity, democratic participation—that exposed contradictions in existing practices. Environmental protection gained traction when advocates connected polluting policies to long-term values like protecting future generations. Social Security and Medicare endure because they reflect widely shared values about collective responsibility for human security.
When Unclear Principles Get Exploited
Policy failures often trace to the exploitation of unclear principles. Financial deregulation proceeded without clear principles about economic integrity or public welfare. This led to the 2008 crisis that destroyed large swaths of the middle class while enriching banks.
Military spending has grown so excessive that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called our national debt “the most significant threat to our national security.” Defense contractors profit while the Pentagon fails basic audits. Healthcare policy remains stalled because insurance companies lobby to increase profits while the value of universal access—both individual and national—gets ignored.
Economic policy demonstrates this manipulation most clearly. When wages stagnate and housing becomes unaffordable, politicians blame immigrants, minorities, or foreign trade. This misdirection serves the wealthy interests who benefit from the wealth concentration and regulatory capture that actually caused these problems.
Extractive practices are those that transfer wealth or value without creating new value in return. These practices benefit narrow interests while undermining the foundation that both businesses and communities depend on.
The Essential Protection
Explicit principles provide protection: they create standards for evaluating proposals and holding decision-makers accountable. Special interests find it much harder to manipulate processes that operate according to stated, publicly defended values.
The Framework: Six Categories of Democratic Values
The Declaration of Independence declares that all people are created equal and that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. The following framework articulates values that flow from these foundational concepts and appear consistently across democratic theory and practice, organized into six functional categories.
The framework includes 33 specific values that work together to guide democratic decision-making. You can read the detailed definitions below, or use this overview to navigate to sections of particular interest:
The 33 Democratic Values:
- Decision-Making Framework (1-7): Evidence, transparency, inclusion
- Resource Allocation (8-13): Efficiency, sustainability, fairness
- Rights and Responsibilities (14-19): Individual freedom, equal treatment, cultural respect
- Collective Action (20-23): Public goods, democratic legitimacy, rule of law
- Foundational Human Values (24-28): Dignity, opportunity, security, environmental stewardship
- Governance Structure (29-33): Federalism, institutional integrity, adaptive innovation
Skip to: Understanding Values in Practice
Category 1: Decision-Making Framework Values
How our democracy could approach choices and evaluate options
1. Evidence-based reasoning: policy decisions rest on verifiable information rather than speculation, wishful thinking, or manipulation. Democratic legitimacy depends on decisions that reflect reality rather than fantasy.
2. Proportionality: responses match the scale and severity of problems. Minor issues warrant minor interventions. Major challenges require substantial action. This prevents both under-response to serious problems and over-reaction to manageable ones.
3. Transparency: citizens can understand how decisions get made, why they’re made, and how they’re carried out. Secret processes invite corruption and eliminate accountability. Democratic governance requires that people can trace the reasoning, actions, and implementation of policies that affect their lives.
4. Prudent decision-making: being careful when consequences are uncertain but potentially severe. When facing decisions that might cause serious, irreversible problems, erring on the side of safety while still allowing reasonable innovation and progress.
5. Reversibility: favoring policies that can be modified or undone as circumstances change or evidence emerges. Permanent commitments require extraordinary justification in democratic systems designed to adapt through ongoing choice.
6. Stakeholder inclusion: ensuring that people affected by decisions have meaningful opportunities to participate in making them. This reflects democratic assumptions about self-governance and produces better information for decision-making.
7. Civic capacity building: fostering the knowledge, skills, and civic engagement necessary for citizens to participate meaningfully in democratic governance. This includes critical thinking, understanding of democratic processes, and ongoing civic education that enables citizens to engage in values-based reasoning and resist manipulation.
Category 2: Resource Allocation Values
How democratic societies distribute benefits, burdens, and opportunities
8. Economic efficiency: seeking to maximize beneficial outcomes relative to costs. This prevents waste of collective resources and enables societies to accomplish more with available means.
9. Sustainability: protecting the capacity of natural and social systems to support human flourishing over time. Short-term gains that undermine long-term capacity violate democratic responsibilities to future generations.
10. Local knowledge: recognizing that people closest to problems often understand them best and that solutions must fit particular circumstances. This prevents generic approaches that ignore relevant context.
11. Investment in capacity: prioritizing building systems and capabilities that enable ongoing success rather than consuming resources without replacement. This includes infrastructure, education, research, and institutional development.
12. Equitable burden-sharing: distributing costs according to capacity to bear them and benefit from outcomes. This reflects democratic assumptions about equal worth and prevents systems that exploit some people for others’ benefit.
13. Economic democracy: preventing excessive concentration of economic power that can undermine democratic governance, while ensuring that economic systems serve democratic values rather than subverting them. This includes protecting against monopolistic practices and ensuring that economic success strengthens rather than weakens democratic institutions.
Category 3: Rights and Responsibilities Values
Balancing individual freedom with collective needs
14. Personal autonomy: protecting individuals’ capacity to make meaningful choices about their own lives within bounds that respect others’ equal autonomy. This includes freedom of expression, association, and conscience.
15. Equal treatment under law: prohibiting arbitrary distinctions that advantage some people over others without legitimate justification. Democratic governance requires consistent application of agreed-upon rules.
16. Due process: ensuring fair procedures before imposing penalties or restrictions on individuals. This protects against abuse of power and maintains trust in democratic institutions.
17. Privacy and dignity: limiting intrusion into personal life and protecting human worth against reduction to mere instrumental value. People exist as ends in themselves, not solely as means to others’ purposes.
18. Collective responsibility: recognizing that individual welfare depends partly on social conditions and that maintaining democratic society requires shared contributions to common needs.
19. Cultural pluralism: respecting diverse cultural traditions and ways of life within shared democratic frameworks, recognizing that democratic values can be expressed through different cultural forms while maintaining common civic commitments. This strengthens democracy by drawing on diverse wisdom while preserving essential democratic principles.
Category 4: Collective Action Values
Enabling effective governance and protecting democratic institutions
20. Public goods protection: maintaining resources and systems that benefit everyone but that markets alone cannot adequately provide. This includes clean air and water, basic research, infrastructure, and democratic institutions themselves.
21. Economic integrity: preventing fraud, manipulation, and concentration of power that undermines both market function and democratic governance. Fair dealing enables trust and cooperation.
22. Democratic legitimacy: requiring that governmental authority derive from consent of the governed through processes that respect political equality and meaningful choice. This requires robust protection of free speech – citizens must be able to speak, write, and associate freely to participate in self-governance and hold leaders accountable. Democracy cannot function when speech is suppressed by either government or concentrated private power.
23. Rule of law: subjecting all persons and institutions, including government officials, to legal constraints that prevent arbitrary exercise of power and protect predictable frameworks for social cooperation.
Category 5: Foundational Human Values
Core assumptions about human worth and potential
24. Human dignity: treating every person as inherently valuable regardless of their productivity, popularity, or power. This basic assumption underlies democratic equality and establishes boundaries for how any individual can be treated.
25. Equal opportunity: providing everyone with genuine chances to develop their capabilities and pursue their goals. This requires both removal of arbitrary barriers and positive provision of basic necessities for human development.
26. Security: protecting people from violence, coercion, and threats that prevent them from exercising their capacities as democratic citizens. This includes physical safety, economic security sufficient for basic needs, and protection from discrimination.
27. Community: recognizing that human flourishing occurs through relationships and shared endeavors. Democratic society must balance individual autonomy with the social bonds that make life meaningful and governance possible.
28. Environmental stewardship: recognizing humanity’s responsibility to protect and restore natural systems that sustain all life, understanding that ecological health is fundamental to human flourishing and democratic society’s long-term viability. This includes responsibility to future generations who will inherit the consequences of current environmental choices.
Category 6: Governance Structure Values
How democratic power could be organized and exercised
29. Federalism: distributing authority across different levels of government to match decision-making capacity with the scope of problems while maintaining democratic accountability at each level.
30. Intergenerational responsibility: considering the effects of current choices on future generations who cannot participate in present decisions but will live with their consequences.
31. Institutional integrity: maintaining the capacity of democratic institutions to function according to their stated purposes rather than being captured by special interests or degraded by neglect.
32. Adaptive governance: building capacity to learn from experience, modify approaches based on evidence, and respond to changing circumstances while maintaining core democratic commitments.
33. Innovation within continuity: embracing beneficial change and democratic innovation while preserving core democratic principles, ensuring that democratic institutions can evolve to meet new challenges without losing their essential character. This enables democracy to remain relevant and effective across changing circumstances.
Understanding Values in Practice
How Values Interact
These 33 values interact in complex ways that shape how democratic societies function. Understanding these interactions helps citizens evaluate policies and hold leaders accountable to stated principles.
Values often reinforce each other. Transparency supports accountability, which strengthens democratic legitimacy. Evidence-based reasoning improves economic efficiency and also protects sustainability. Equal treatment under law promotes both human dignity and social stability.
Stakeholder inclusion produces local knowledge while building community bonds. Civic capacity building strengthens all other values by ensuring citizens can engage meaningfully in democratic processes.
When Values Conflict
Values also conflict, requiring prioritization and balance. Economic efficiency may create tension with environmental sustainability. Individual autonomy may clash with collective responsibility. Security needs may compete with privacy protections.
Majority rule may threaten minority rights. Innovation within continuity may require balancing change with stability. These tensions are built into democratic governance rather than problems to be solved permanently.
When values conflict, we need to think about priorities. What’s at stake? Who pays the costs and gets the benefits? What are the long-term consequences of different choices? How do various options affect other important values? This thinking process separates principled disagreement from manipulation or confusion.
Applying Values to Policy Areas
Values provide frameworks for evaluating policy proposals across all areas of governance. Tax policy reflects assumptions about economic efficiency, burden-sharing, and the role of collective action. Criminal justice policy embodies values about human dignity, public safety, and equal treatment.
Education policy expresses priorities regarding equal opportunity, local knowledge, and intergenerational responsibility. Healthcare policy involves economic efficiency, human dignity, collective responsibility, and individual autonomy. Environmental policy requires balancing economic democracy, environmental stewardship, and intergenerational responsibility.
Example: Bridge Replacement Using Values-Based Reasoning
Consider how values-based reasoning works in practice. A town has a 50-year-old bridge that remains safe but requires increasingly expensive annual repairs. The town council must decide whether to replace it now or continue maintenance until replacement becomes unavoidable.
Evidence-based reasoning: What do engineering reports show about the bridge’s condition and remaining lifespan? How do replacement costs compare to ongoing maintenance over the next 20 years?
Economic efficiency: Continued repairs might cost less annually but more over time. Bridge replacement requires significant upfront investment but eliminates ongoing maintenance costs and supports economic development.
Stakeholder inclusion: Who depends on the bridge? Daily commuters, local businesses, emergency services, and freight companies all have relevant perspectives on timing and design requirements.
Prudent decision-making: What happens if the bridge fails unexpectedly? Replacing a functioning bridge feels expensive, but emergency replacement during a crisis costs much more.
Intergenerational responsibility: Current residents could pass maintenance costs to future taxpayers, or invest now in infrastructure that serves the next generation.
Sustainability: How long will different options last? A well-built replacement could serve the community for 75 years with minimal maintenance.
This process moves beyond political rhetoric about “wasteful spending” vs. “crumbling infrastructure” to focus on evidence about what actually serves the community’s long-term interests.
Moving Beyond Partisan Categories
The framework helps distinguish values from partisan positions. Many values appear across the political spectrum, even when people disagree about their relative importance or specific applications. Conservatives and progressives both value economic efficiency, though they may disagree about how to achieve it. Both support human dignity, though they may emphasize different threats to it. Both want effective governance, though they may prefer different institutional arrangements.
This suggests possibilities for productive dialogue based on shared values even amid disagreement about policies. Rather than arguing from fixed positions, citizens can engage in thinking about which values apply to particular situations and how to balance competing principles.
Building Values Consensus
Process vs. Outcome Agreement
Democratic communities need processes for identifying shared principles and working productively with disagreements that remain. This requires distinguishing between process agreement and outcome agreement.
Process agreement means shared commitment to values-based reasoning even when people reach different conclusions. Citizens might agree that policy decisions reflect evidence, respect human dignity, and consider long-term consequences while disagreeing about what those principles require in particular cases. This agreement on process enables productive debate about specific choices.
Communities need ways to identify shared principles through structured dialogue that separates values clarification from policy advocacy. What principles do we want to guide our decision-making? How do we define and prioritize these values? What evidence would help us evaluate whether policies serve these principles? These conversations establish frameworks for subsequent policy discussions.
Building civic capacity is essential to this process. Citizens need the knowledge and skills to engage in values-based reasoning, understand how different policy choices affect democratic values, and resist manipulation by those who exploit unclear principles.
Working with Disagreement
Working with values disagreements productively means acknowledging that reasonable people can prioritize principles differently while respecting the legitimacy of diverse viewpoints. People who emphasize individual autonomy and people who emphasize collective responsibility both hold legitimate democratic values. Their disagreement is about balance and application. It’s not about fundamental principles of democratic governance.
Cultural pluralism enriches this process by recognizing that democratic values can be expressed through different cultural traditions while maintaining shared civic commitments. This diversity of perspectives strengthens democratic decision-making when channeled through shared values frameworks.
Creating Accountability
Values-based accountability creates ongoing responsibilities for both citizens and leaders. Citizens must explain their own values clearly and evaluate leaders’ actions against stated principles rather than partisan loyalty. Leaders must explain how their proposals serve democratic values and accept responsibility when their actions contradict their stated principles.
This accountability operates differently from interest-based politics. Rather than asking “does this serve my group?”, values-based evaluation asks “does this serve the principles we claim to support?”
This shift changes the terms of political engagement. Instead of zero-sum competition where one side’s gain requires another’s loss, it creates shared responsibility for democratic governance.
Beyond Left and Right
Traditional left-right political categories obscure more than they illuminate about democratic values. The framework presented here transcends these categories by focusing on principles that support democratic governance regardless of particular policy preferences.
Economic Policy Examples
Consider economic policy. Both progressive and conservative approaches can reflect democratic values, though they may emphasize different principles or reach different conclusions about specific policies. Market-oriented approaches may emphasize economic efficiency, individual autonomy, and adaptive governance. Government-centered approaches may emphasize collective action, equal opportunity, and sustainability. Both orientations can serve legitimate democratic values.
The addition of economic democracy as a value helps distinguish between productive market activity and concentrations of economic power that undermine democratic governance itself. This allows for principled evaluation of economic policies based on their effects on democratic institutions rather than ideological preferences.
Explicit Reasoning vs. Manipulation
The key difference involves explicit reasoning about principles versus manipulation of unclear assumptions. A conservative argument for tax cuts that explains how lower rates might improve economic efficiency while protecting basic public goods differs fundamentally from a conservative argument that simply promises “more money in your pocket.” A progressive argument for social programs that explains how collective investment serves equal opportunity and human dignity differs from a progressive argument that simply promises benefits without costs.
Reducing Manipulation
Values-based reasoning reduces manipulation by requiring explicit justification for policy positions. Politicians and advocates must not only explain their reasoning but defend it when challenged.
Special interests find it harder to exploit unclear principles when citizens demand explanations of how proposals serve stated democratic values. Citizens must keep pressing when the answers don’t hold up. Lobbyists cannot simply invoke “freedom” or “fairness” without specifying freedom for whom and fairness according to what standard.
They must respond when others point out contradictions or gaps in their logic. Civic capacity building strengthens this protection by ensuring citizens have the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate these explanations and hold leaders accountable for contradictions between stated values and actual policies.
Strengthening Democratic Discussion
This creates space for principled disagreement that strengthens rather than weakens democratic discussion. Citizens can disagree about policy priorities while maintaining shared commitment to evidence-based reasoning, human dignity, and democratic legitimacy. This disagreement produces better policies through competition between approaches that must justify themselves according to explicit principles.
Identifying Violations
The framework also reveals how extreme positions on either side violate democratic values. Authoritarian approaches that concentrate power and eliminate accountability contradict democratic governance regardless of their ideological labels. Policies that treat some people as expendable resources violate human dignity whether they serve “efficiency” or “equality.” Approaches that ignore evidence or refuse adaptation violate democratic responsibilities to learn and improve.
Reclaiming Democratic Decision-Making
Protection Against Capture
Values-based navigation offers essential protection against the capture of democratic institutions by special interests. When citizens demand explicit reasoning about principles, they create accountability systems that resist manipulation and serve broader democratic purposes.
This protection operates at multiple levels. Individual citizens who clarify their own values become harder to manipulate through appeals to unclear principles or emotional manipulation. Communities that establish explicit values frameworks can evaluate policies according to stated criteria rather than partisan positioning.
Democratic institutions that operate according to transparent principles maintain legitimacy and effectiveness over time.
Individual and Collective Responsibility
The path forward requires both individual responsibility and collective action. Citizens must engage in the demanding work of clarifying their own values and thinking about how those principles apply to complex policy choices. This means moving beyond partisan loyalty toward principled evaluation of leaders and policies according to stated democratic values.
Citizens also bear responsibility for contributing to broader values conversation. Democracy requires ongoing dialogue about shared principles and their applications to changing circumstances. This conversation must include diverse perspectives while maintaining commitment to democratic governance itself.
Civic capacity building ensures that citizens have the tools necessary for this engagement. Environmental stewardship reminds us that democratic governance must consider long-term consequences for the natural systems that sustain human society. Cultural pluralism enriches democratic dialogue by drawing on diverse traditions and perspectives.
Innovation within continuity ensures that democratic institutions can adapt to meet new challenges while preserving essential principles.
Our Contribution to Democracy
The framework presented here offers one contribution to this essential dialogue. These 33 values, organized into six categories, emerge from democratic theory and practice. They provide tools for principled reasoning about policy choices and protection against manipulation by special interests.
The Stakes
The stakes are substantial. Democracy without explicit values frameworks becomes vulnerable to capture by concentrated interests that exploit unclear principles for narrow advantage. American politics demonstrates this vulnerability through decades of policy decisions that serve special interests rather than democratic governance.
Restoring Our Founding Vision
Values-based decision making can restore government to its founding purpose. We can secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, deriving just power from the consent of the governed. We can reclaim that vision. This requires commitment from citizens who understand that democracy requires ongoing responsibility for the principles that guide our choices and their consequences.
The Choice Before Us
The choice before us is clear: continue operating without a clear game plan—allowing manipulation to continue—or do the more demanding work of values-based governance that protects and strengthens our democracy.
This framework provides the foundation for that more demanding work, offering explicit principles that can guide democratic decision-making while protecting against the manipulation that has captured too much of American governance. The path forward requires citizens committed to these values and the ongoing work of democratic citizenship they demand.
Further Reading:
Protecting Communities from Special Interest Capture in Housing Policy: How Values-Based Decision Making Serves Real Prosperity – See how values-based reasoning can address housing affordability by distinguishing between productive business activity and extractive practices that harm both working families and legitimate businesses.
Breaking the Higher Education Capture: Values-Based Decision Making for Educational Opportunity – Explore how special interests have transformed higher education from workforce development into debt extraction, trapping students in survival mode while communities lose skilled workers and engaged citizens.
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