we want politics to emerge from "public-minded critical discussion"
but "public politics does not in fact conform" to this "idealized self-understanding"
Warner sees this as an "endlessly repeated discovery [...] made by the Romantics, by Marx, by Lippmann, by Adorno, by Habermas, [and] by Foucault" but notes that these critics do not "generate enough moral passion to force politics into conformity"
"The image of discussion writ large is necessary to the public sphere as a self-understanding but not as an empirical reality"