Virtue Outsourcing & the Rise of Limousine Populism

A friend who lives in what Fox News calls “real America” and normal people call “Ohio” tells a story of attending an upscale book club among well-off urban liberals and Never Trump types. Without interruption, she observed, the conversation flowed from the moral calamity of having failed to elect Kamala Harris (mainly for the sake of working-class people of color) to complaints about the aesthetic undesirability of construction to add more housing units to a building next door (mainly for the benefit of working-class people of color). This is what technologist L. M. Sacasas describes as “outsourcing virtue”: the urge of modern societies to offload traditional moral responsibilities onto technological and bureaucratic systems.