Why a yardstick

The failure mode

A movement without a fixed external standard measures against its own preferences. It will not notice it is doing this, because preferences feel like principles from the inside.

Then two things follow, reliably:

It cannot be wrong. Any inconvenient finding gets reinterpreted, because the standard is whatever the movement currently believes. A thing that cannot be wrong is not making claims; it is expressing an identity.

It cannot be joined. Nobody who disagrees about policy can participate, because participating means adopting the movement's policy views wholesale. The membership converges on people who already agreed, and the movement stops learning anything.

What a fixed standard buys

Findings that survive contact with people who dislike them. "This law removed a check that previously existed" is checkable by somebody who thinks the law was a good idea.

A test we can fail. If the standard says something we did not want it to say, we have to say it anyway. That is the whole value of borrowing a yardstick you did not write.

A coalition wider than an opinion. People who agree on nothing else can agree that a vote should have been allowed to happen.

The specific test the movement applies to itself

Written into the specs, in these words: would this still be true if the person it lands on had a different letter after their name?

If a finding, a rule, or a piece of copy only works pointed one direction, it does not ship. It is a test about evenhandedness, and it applies everywhere on this site.

It matters most at the four party front doors — Republican, Democrat, Libertarian and Democratic Socialist. Those four are written separately, for four different audiences, from four different messaging files, and they are free to differ. What they may not do is bend the arithmetic. The awards come out of one pipeline, computed party-blind, and the unit of judgement is always a person and a vote rather than a party. A door that needed the numbers to come out its way would be a skin with no yardstick, which is exactly the failure this page is about.

Why not simply "what most people want"

Because a majority is a fact about a moment, not a standard. Majorities can be manufactured, and much of what the movement documents is the manufacturing.

More practically: what people want is precisely what the movement is trying to measure the government against. Using it as the yardstick too would make the instrument and the measurement the same thing.