Word abuse: "Democratic"

In an article in this week's The New York Times Magazine, an executive with a company that invented a new parking-meter system says the invention makes parking "more democratic."

The system, InnovaPark, tells parking meters when a car leaves a space, and the meter reverts to $0, even if there's paid time left — so the next person to pull in can't mooch off the leftovers.

This doesn't make parking more democratic. It makes it more bureaucratic —— in that it brings parking enforcement and nitpicky asshole-ism into the computer age. This system says that if you buy parking and don't use all the parking you paid for, abandoning the remainder, the city owns it again, instead of the next taker to come along. But maybe that takes us away from the definition of "democratic" and into more nitpicky shit about economic regulation.

The only point, of course, is for cities to grub more money from meters and tickets. Being more "democratic" is beside the point — just as it is when people invoke "democratic" principles to criticize the decisions of appointed judges or justices. In these cases, "democratic" conditions are those in which everybody has to take a certain kind of shit in the same specific way.

One could argue that this makes parking more democratic in the sense that it eliminates an advantage that isn't based on merit or work. Even so, how egalitarian do you have to get? The word applies vaguely to the situation. In this and many other cases, it's just a rhetorical flash grenade people throw out there when they run out of good arguments. The desired effect, as far as I can tell, is that you'll be overwhelmed with the idealism of the statement and will have a hard time refuting it with logic (because it's not logical), even though it's being used to justify something that's a huge pain in the ass.