Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press . Crawley, WA : University of Western Australia Press, 2006.[Book Review]

No one dies in The War on Democracy, as the authors’ incipit reads. Like the “History Wars” (and unlike the War on Terror), the war on democracy is only a war of ideas. Lucy and Mickler analyse seven conservative commentators in the Australian media – Luke Slattery, Miranda Devine, Gerard Handerson, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Michael Duffy and Christopher Pearson – to argue that, in their newspaper columns or public interventions, they “oppose the spread of democratic ideas” and thus “op-pose the very idea and ideal of democracy itself” (4).