Standing drift is the recognition that a standing legitimate at one time can become inappropriate at another, since standing is relational and relationships change. A parent holds extraordinary standing over a five-year-old’s life and far less over a forty-year-old’s; a founder may appropriately control a small startup while the same concentration of authority becomes inappropriate once the company runs critical national infrastructure; emergency leadership standing legitimate during a disaster should not necessarily survive it.
So standings themselves require review, transition, expiration, and reassessment — they are not permanent grants. This is the graduated, expiring quality the model asks of authority everywhere, applied to standing itself, and it pairs with the requirement that standing stay contestable: a standing that can neither be challenged nor allowed to lapse becomes exactly the kind of fixed rank the framework exists to prevent. See What Standing Governs.