 Indeed, the assumption that all those subject to political authority enjoy the developed capacity to reflectively accept their life path and the values inherent in it invokes a level of idealization that belies the conditions of many victims of past and ongoing oppression. This virtually ensures that such structural conditions of society as racial domination, profound inequality of power, and patterns of exclusion of groups from equal standing in social space will be assumed away as irrelevant to the question of legitimacy (Mills 2005).