yield a legitimate uniform consensus, and power imbalances can never truly be removed from the public sphere, then one must accept the inevitability of conflict in the political realm. Rather than attempting to wholly eliminate conflict in the political, which agonistic pluralists maintain is conceptually impossible, agonistic pluralism is the model of democracy which attempts to mobilize these passions "towards the promotion of democratic designs." Agonistic pluralists emphasize how the construction of group identities relies on a continuous "other"; this us/them conflict is inherent to politics, and it should be the role of democratic institutions to mitigate such conflicts. The role of agonistic pluralism is to transform antagonistic sentiments into agonistic ones. As Mouffe writes, "this presupposes that the 'other' is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question." Agonistic pluralists view this conversion of "enemies" into "adversaries" as being fundamental to well-functioning democracies and the only way to properly limit domination. Criticisms of agonistic pluralism One criticism of agonistic pluralism is that, in its rejection of deliberative democracy, it inadvertently relies on the same fundamental presuppositions of rational consensus. Andrew Knops argues that agonistic pluralists, such as Chantal Mouffe, assert a "single, universal characterization of the political" in their depiction of the political as a realm of ineradicable antagonism and conflict. For Knops, this universalistic description of the political undermines agonistic pluralists' post-structuralist critiques of rational argumentation. Others build on this criticism, arguing that agonists' focus on passions, power, and the limits of reason ultimately reduces the persuasive capacity of their political and social theories, which remain largely reliant on the process of rationalization. Another criticism of agonistic pluralism is its failure to provide a real avenue through which antagonism can be transformed into agonism, or enemies into adversaries. Agonistic pluralists maintain that, in order to mediate antagonism, all parties must share some ethico-political principles. For instance, a successful agonistic pluralism requires that all parties share commitments to democratic ideals such as "equality" and "liberty," although the contents of these normative conceptions can vary greatly across groups. Yet, it is argued by critics of agonistic pluralism that, on the one hand, if parties share the same ethico-political principles, then a consensus need not be prohibited through ineradicable conflict. On the other hand, if individuals do