They’re not imaginary, they’re everywhere. Everywhere you look you’ll find people who think politics isn’t about changing things, but about adhering to idealistic moral prescriptions, or people who invert reality and think that ideas are the cause of material conditions, not the other way around: you see it whenever someone uses the concept of punitive justice based on free will and that individuals choosing evil are the root of societal problems while ignoring the material context that creates those people. There are like endless examples of these liberals; liberalism is the dominant ideology that is so prevalent it can pretend to be apoliticalism.