In its totality, public discourse in America over the most important and often the most trivial issues of the day is not discourse at all. Under the conditions of late modernity, public discourse as a rational exchange of competing positions is difficult and perhaps impossible in our public culture. Surely if it isn’t possible within colleges and universities, as it seems to be, it is not likely anywhere else, least of all among movement activists, policy makers, party officials, and politicians. What we have, rather, is a simulacrum of public moral debate that has come to conceal a raw and brutalizing competing will to power.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 313.