Who does Catherine Deveny want to purge?

Catherine Deveny is impatient. There are too many middle-aged, middle-class white men holding responsible positions in the workforce for her liking. They're not easy to get rid of. Catherine doesn't want to wait for them to fade away - she wants them culled. They're standing in the way of change.

That's the gist of a recent column Catherine Deveny penned for the Melbourne Age. Here are some choice extracts:

... there are too many rich, middle-aged, middle-class white men in suits running the place. They are the ones who got us into this financial and economic mess. An impenetrable wall of them is not the answer to getting us out of it ...

We're not saying Ians should be exterminated. God knows we need them. Who else would file the tax returns, perform hip replacements and keep Harley Davidson in business? We're just saying it wouldn't hurt to cull a few. My suggestion is to organise a program to reduce the number of Ians by 70% ...

Even more terrifying than the disproportionate number of Ians who have always held the power is the mindless chant of "It's just the way it is" when you mention it. This may be true, but it doesn't mean that ... it's not time to subvert the dominant paradigm ...

The Ians are not taking the involuntary redundancies ... The Ians are too expensive to sack ... Many being strapped to the rocket of power at the moment are Ians who've been waiting patiently in line ... Blokes being rewarded for playing the game by the rules ... They're out of touch. They're not the answer ...

The Ians set up the power structure and it's tricky for anyone else to get in without knowing the password, the secret handshake and the magic dance. Apparently you had to have your name down before you were born.

It's interesting to consider the way Deveny crafts this piece. She's trying to tell an audience of "Ians" - white male professionals - that they are redundant, holding back progress and should be shunted aside. She humanises the message somewhat by throwing in some humourous quips. Written any more bluntly and the message would come across as more obviously vicious.

Note too the way that Deveny slips in the idea that white Australian men are responsible for the world financial crisis. She doesn't debate the idea or make any arguments for it. She simply assumes it as a given.

Yet it's a ridiculous claim. The crisis began in America at a time when the Australian economy was strong. The origin of the crisis was a misguided egalitarianism promoted not by the average white collar worker but by those in the political class who demanded that banks equalise mortgages given to ethnic minorities in the US, even if this meant approving loans to those unable to repay them.

Deveny also simply assumes that she is a deprived outsider, locked out of a power structure dominated by white men. Again, we are supposed to simply assume this to be true.

It's difficult, though, to see Deveny as a marginalised, excluded outsider. She has a cushy, influential job, writing for a major newspaper with an audience of hundreds of thousands. How many men really have a greater chance to influence society than she does?

She wants us to think of her as the outsider, the dissenter, the maverick, the creative innovator. In reality she is yet another member of the left-liberal political establishment, which has fashioned the course of Western societies for generations now. She is an orthodox insider offering us the same politics and the same ideas which have dominated the West for decades.

There's craftiness too in her portrayal of white men. On the one hand, she emphasises the idea that white men have power that others lack. She doesn't want to give the impression, though, that this makes white men strong or capable. No, white men are old, stale, burnt out, and incompetent. White men are "Ians" - all too ordinary and comfortable. Pretenders in cardigans.

It's an odd picture; white men are "terrifying" in their power but at the same time to be ridiculed as bumbling suburban uncle types. We are invited to smugly look down on white men even as we complain about their "impenetrable" power.

Which raises an important question. Why would any self-respecting white man go along with the politics of the left? Why put up with this kind of treatment?

Lawrence Auster made a similar point in a column posted yesterday. He observed that the real development of liberalism is not toward a race neutral society, but toward the disempowerment and denigration of whites. In other words, if you're white then you're not going to be treated neutrally:

Liberalism is not a journey from a historically white society to a society in which race neutrality is the guiding principle. It is a journey from a historically white society to a society in which the advance of nonwhites as nonwhites—along with its corollary, the disempowerment and denigration of whites as whites—is the guiding principle. And if those are the rules of the game, why should any self-respecting, non-suicidal white person play?