Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. It also articulates and rearticulates (expresses and reshapes) the core of the civic, the vital beating heart of a democracy. This core is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. In the political morality I see emerging, the separation of the political and the normative is subsiding. Conceptually, power and right are becoming entangled rather than bifurcated. 

The way out is to restore democracy to its deliberative roots in competent citizenship, to liberate popular government from money and reinstate it as a domain of civic competence and citizen participation, and to help democracy cross borders to address global problems.