The speech and the columnists share a ferocity of rhetoric, violent and militaristic metaphors, and moral polarisation. There is a sense of certainty, even smugness, about their own beliefs, matched by a mean-spirited framing of all those they disagree with as fools, if not traitors, and a willingness not only to distort those views but often to invent them. They manage their self-portrayal as at once the voice of the people and also as an embattled minority, by conjuring the ever-present spectre of political correctness and its dominance of intellectual life.

It is this chorus of conservative columnists that is the subject of Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler’s book. As they rightly comment, conservatives dominate ‘the public sphere at present, so that conservatives get to make all the insults’. This domination was not evident in, say, 1983, when Bob Hawke came to power. The proliferation of ‘soap boxes’ – newspaper columns, talk-back radio – and their domination by the right, their shrillness and indifference to any counter-evidence, are some of the major trends in Australian media over recent decades. It parallels the trend in the United States, where, according to one of its disillusioned defectors, David Brock, the Republican Noise Machine is indifferent to professional constraints that guide the ‘élite’, ‘liberal’ media, such as the New York Times, and that has ‘hijacked’ public discourse.

Lucy and Mickler examine seven columnists: Albrechtsen, Devine and Duffy, all quoted above, plus Luke Slattery, Gerard Henderson, Andrew Bolt and Christopher Pearson. I would have thought that Akerman and Sheridan were more eminent and at least as outrageous as some included, but no selection can please everyone.

The authors score many palpable hits in reviewing the works of what they dub their less than magnificent seven. They rescue from obscurity Pearson’s bold commendation of new marriage covenants, where the wife vows, for example, ‘to be submissive to you even to the point of adopting your will and desires as my own’. They incisively debunk Bolt’s claims about what he calls ‘the Chernobyl hoax’ and his amazing article that included refrains such as: ‘The Australia I have long loved didn’t judge people by the colour of their skin. Until now.’ The action that had so stirred Bolt was a change in the preamble to the Victorian Constitution recognising the original inhabitants before colonisation. But the disproportion and inappropriateness of his response pale before the sheer historical inaccuracy, simply erasing from existence the White Australia policy and the inferior legal standing of Aborigines until the 1960s. To me, this is perhaps the greatest danger of the new soapboxes in the media: that for the Bolts and Alan Joneses, not only is their rhetorical flow so undisciplined by any empirical evidence, but that only very infrequently does inaccuracy carry any punishment. Apparently, Bolt’s blissful ignorance of the history of Australian race relations brought no tangible consequences.

Lucy and Mickler are more concerned to defend postmodernism from the distortions that writers such as Slattery and Bolt subject it to. Sometimes this works well and their expositions are clear, but not always. For example, they have a nice conceit suggesting that Devine is really an undercover practitioner of postmodernism, but then they conclude: ‘The first person pronoun is no more than a position to be occupied by a subject that is always multiple and fractured, made up out of competing and often incommensurable differences. In a word, Devine shows that each of us is discontinuous with ourselves; every “I” lacks the assurance of a centre.’ Reading Devine has prompted many thoughts in me, but never that.

Occasionally, Lucy and Mickler go beyond any evidence in ascribing motives for the columnists’ attitudes to postmodernism: ‘Since it would be unspeakable for Slattery to come out against democracy, he has to say instead that he’s opposed to something he calls “postmodernism”’; and: ‘What stirs them to fear and trembling is not the philosophical but the political import of ideas associated with the likes of Derrida, Barthes and Foucault.’

Such ascription of motives without any supporting evidence is one of the trademarks of the columnists they are criticising. Another trait they sometimes share with their subjects is their wish to give capsule judgments on a great variety of topics, such as the ineptitude of a succession of ALP leaders; that under Stalin the gulags ‘were filled significantly with Marxist revolutionaries’; that ‘the real ideological winner’ (as if that is a meaningful phrase anyway) ‘in the aftermath of “9/11” has not been Islamism but rather conservatism in the West’; that, before Howard, the nation ‘seemed to be transforming itself from a constitutional monarchy into the postmodern republic’; that ‘Marx didn’t dream up the promise of democracy on his own’; that Deleuze actually had a high opinion of David Hume. The book would be better off without most of these.

The authors dub these columnists conservative, properly so in the sense that they do tend to leave absent from their work issues of ‘privilege, power, accountability and self-interest’, and overwhelmingly they blame progressives and state institutions for social problems. But this is no justification for ascribing without evidence or argument to conservatives all sorts of nasty attributes: ‘Conservatives can’t get their heads around the possibility that culture wants to be free … Failing to understand that culture (as it were) desires freedom, conservatism cannot account for social progress’; and: ‘No doubt she couldn’t tell it like it is, because conservatives dare not speak the truth about conservatism in public.’

Moreover, the term conservatism has many layers of meaning, which scholars using it in their title should attend to: prudence; respect for institutions; appreciation of the messiness of society and change that often leads to grand policies having unintended consequences. Dennis Shanahan regarded Howard’s Quadrant speech as ‘setting out an aggressive agenda for changing institutional Australia’ (Australian, 7 October 2006). Albrechtsen, quoted above, sees him as confronting old orthodoxies and challenging the status quo. Is this conservative? Was it conservative to launch a war in Iraq, the most massive attempt at social engineering of this century? If there is a risk of global warming, is it ‘conservative’ to plunge ahead producing ever more CO₂ before all the evidence is in? Sometimes both Howard and his fan club could use a greater dose of conservatism.

Nor is there any justification for titling the book a ‘war’ against democracy. These conservatives may talk about the ‘ideas war’, but that is part of their rhetorical extravagance and intolerance. To have columnists like these so prominent in our public life does not enrich democracy, but neither does it endanger it. Perhaps it is the price of democracy. Certainly, contesting their influence, as this book does, sometimes more satisfactorily than others, is part of making democracy more vigorous.