In a healthy democracy, there would be nothing necessarily wrong with a major party fully embracing demagoguery as its modus operandi. As long as a republic's other franchisees meet the demagogues on the field of political battle, according to fair and prearranged rules of engagement, we can be confident democratic partisans would win the day.

But we don't live in healthy democracy, because one of our major parties, in addition to embracing demagoguery as its modus operandi, has declared war on public debate. Instead of engaging in politics, in which winners emerge from the partisan clash of ideas, Republicans have for decades told party members that policies don't matter and that issues don't matter – all that matters are matters of identity.

"Identity politics" is a phrase usually reserved for liberal Democrats said to have lost touch with the white working-class or activist movements like Black Lives Matter. But these factions do not place identity at the center of their politics, because they must by necessity build broad and diverse coalitions to achieve their goals. Values, like political equality, are central, not group identity.

The opposite is true of today's Republican Party. It can win – and did win in 2016 – by dividing the electorate between "us" and "them," and bypassing serious debate over policies and principles. Identity, specifically white group identity, is central to not only how it operates but to its being. Indeed, it's not possible to imagine today's GOP without white group identity. And because identity is so central, it has evolved into a party of demagogues.

Patricia Roberts-Miller, a rhetoric professor at the University of Texas at Austin, put it this way in her slim new volume titled "Demagoguery and Democracy": "Demagoguery depoliticizes politics," she said, "in that it says we don't have to argue policies, and can just rouse ourselves to new levels of commitment to *us* and purify our community or nation of *them*. It says that we are in such a desperate situation that we can no longer afford *them* the same treatment we want for *us*."

Identity, of course, is probably hard-wired. It seems reasonable that our ancestors evolved with a sense that in-group members were safe while out-group members were dangerous. Even "The Federalist Papers," Roberts-Miller told me during a short conversation over the phone, were preoccupied by identity. "It was central the American conception of democracy," she said. "Identity politics" was not called that until the last century when partisans fought to enfranchise Americans of "marked identity" – that is, anyone who was not a straight, male and white.

Roberts-Miller has been studying demagoguery for years. She first noticed the trend begin to surge in the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Public debate from conservative quarters was not about the pros and cons of invasion but "demonizing deliberation" itself, she said. "People were listening to pundits say they shouldn't listen to politics." All they had to do was trust President George W. Bush.

"Demonizing deliberation" isn't the only cause of our democracy's illness. So is Russia's assault on American public opinion. During the summer of 2016, Roberts-Miller saw supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders retelling stories about Hillary Clinton that "were very clearly Russian in origin." This is more terrifying than most realize, because Russia's success in bending public opinion in favor of a candidate who favors Russia is not supposed to happen. What's supposed to happen, according to Aristotle, is truth prevailing over falsehood.

But it didn't.

The key here is "all things being equal." All things being equal, the ancient Greek philosopher wrote in "Rhetoric," truth will defeat falsehood in a open contest of ideas. But when 10 million people see Facebook ads purchased for $100,000 that spread with laser-precision anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant propaganda, when thousands of Twitter bots savage Donald Trump's primary rivals before their campaigns have even begun, when Russian "active measures" are discovered on Google, the world's largest ad platform, all things are very not equal. Given most do not even know they are spreading falsehoods at the time they are spreading them, Aristotle's solution in the event of truth's failure – to blame the audience and the culture they inhabit – seems maddeningly inadequate.

Demagoguery, thank god, doesn't work on small-r republicans who believe in democracy, because democracy runs against the grain of in-group and out-group thinking. Justice, for instance, isn't only for those who deserve it—meaning the in-group. Instead, justice is a product of due process, equal treatment and impartial adjudication. In other words, justice is about liberal democratic values.

Indeed, those who believe democracy is the best form of government because it's the least bad form of government know demagoguery just sounds too simple, and so it has a limited hold on their thinking. As Roberts-Miller wrote in her new book: "Democracy is about having to listen, and compromise, and it's about being wrong (and admitting it). It's about guessing – because the world is complicated – the best course of action, and trying to look at things from various perspectives, and letting people with those various perspectives participate in the conversation.