Virtue Outsourcing and the Rise of Limousine Populism

Republicans risk falling into the same trap that Democrats continually find themselves in.

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.

Sacasas quotes a line from T.S. Eliot in which the poet describes “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” The line, he reflects, “has always struck me as a rather apt characterization of a certain technocratic impulse, an impulse that presumes that techno-bureaucratic structures and processes can eliminate the necessity for virtue, or maybe even human involvement altogether.” To the contemporary mind, there is “no need for good judgment, responsible governance, self-sacrifice or mutual care” if a technical solution can instead address the problem at hand. 

As my friend experienced, in this model of political morality, tribal affiliation substitutes for the harder work of actually listening to what working people feel and want. Advocate for the “right” policy programs and the respectable political candidates, and one’s obligation of solidarity is discharged. Or, as former president Joe Biden likes to say, quoting his father, “Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget—and I'll tell you what you value.”  

Mocking establishment liberals for this behavior is the lowest of low-hanging fruit. The phrase “limousine liberal” dates from 1969; this sort of politics is decades past its sell-by date. Nor is it hard to see why this sort of virtue outsourcing might seem the natural province of political liberalism, with its policy preference for solving moral quandaries by funding policy programs enacted elsewhere by other people, and its philosophical “preference for proceduralism…[as] an adequate foundation for a just society,” in Sacasas’s words. New York Times columnist David Brooks put the matter sharply in a recent column about conservatism’s better intuitive grasp of the need to connect with what really matters to people:

Since the Progressive era, Democrats have seen society through a government policy lens that is often oblivious to the prepolitical social fabric that holds or does not hold society together from the bottom. Democrats have often been technocratic, relying excessively on social science, policy wonkery; they are prone to the kind of thinking that does not see the sinews of our common life — the stuff that cannot be quantified. 

Democrats are the party of the elite managerial class, and it’s hard for us affluent, educated types in blue cities to really understand the gut-wrenching disgust, rage and alienation that envelop the less privileged as they watch their social order collapse.

People want more than a vaguely disgusted dismissal, handed off to the policy-wonk nannies like the inconvenient children of Upper West Side socialites already late for their book clubs where they will toast Kamala Harris and grouse about affordable housing. What people, all people, want is for others to relate to them in a real way, with genuine respect for their experience and beliefs.

This was the underlying genius of Donald Trump’s burger-flipping McDonald’s campaign visit in 2024. The punditocracy’s fulminations—surely working people know he’s never actually worked a service job a day in his life!—missed the point entirely, as Trump intended. The real point, as he and his audience knew perfectly well, was to highlight precisely that class’s disdain for normal people’s preferences. “I know and you know that they think McDonald’s is beneath them, even though you and I like it,” was the real message. No outsourcing of respect and regard here—I’ll serve it to you direct, with a side of fries.

Certainly, this is more politically effective than whatever it is Democrats think they’re doing. But unless an aesthetic of regard is followed by a governing agenda that is genuinely responsive to the working public’s actual needs, it simply updates the outsourcing playbook—and is all the more dangerous for being better attuned to political moment. There is little risk of Democrats winning with virtue outsourcing politics. There is immense risk that Republicans will not resist their own version of it. Populists can ride limousines to McDonald’s just as much as liberals can ride them to the Met. 

In an 2024 op-ed for Newsweek bluntly titled “Republicans: Stop Cosplaying as Working Class. We Need Policy, Not Theatrics,” the electrician, construction project manager, and conservative writer Skyler Adleta issued a warning in this vein:

Working-class Americans crave a more meaningful participation from politicians than trying to whip us into a frenzy surrounding beer consumption. We are tired of being patronized based on caricatures of the working-class. 

Talk to us about policy. Tell us your plan—clearly and in detail. The working class is full of clever, pragmatic, and attentive people. We have the bandwidth to eagerly absorb the policy ideas of the party vying for our support….There is a kind of apathy that sets in when you think that all politics has to offer is ideological warfare and performative gesturing, and certainly, many working-class people are checked out….Exhibitionism won't be enough to capture the politically wandering working-class.”

Republican leadership has given plenty of reason for concern on this front. With the notable exception of its trade agenda, the Trump administration has yet to capitalize on the working-class governing opportunity its working-class rhetoric earned it. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made substantial cuts to safety-net programs not to address the working public’s pragmatic concern for the nation’s excessive borrowing, but in deference to Washington insiders’ insistence on yet another tax cut for the highest-income households. (Perhaps there is a legitimate point about budgets revealing values, after all.) The Department of Justice’s efforts at enforcing competition law, rightly seen as vital to protecting the little guy from concentrated economic power, has lost ground to that very power, operating outside official channels. The nominee to serve as general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board was most recently representing companies like Amazon in cases against workers.

A politics better calibrated for the populist moment but no longer focused on solving the real problems confronting working people becomes virtue outsourcing 2.0: validating the public’s demand for reform but failing to worry much about whether policy responds and then offshoring blame to some other set of elites when nothing changes. 

Unless it begins taking advantage of its moment, the Trump administration will find that offloading moral responsibility to the “elite” will diminish in effectiveness the longer it holds the reins of power itself. Snarking at snobby upper-income liberals deficient in self-awareness is easy. But blaming those elite liberals for America’s problems without delivering change—or worse, simply governing in the interests of an alternative new elite while hiding behind a better political façade than the other guys—shows the working public no more respect or relationship to its real concerns. 

The lie at the heart of both forms of virtue outsourcing, as the writer Sam Pressler puts it, is that “we can have solidarity without proximity.” In his excellent piece “The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” Pressler shares his frustration with the Washington discourse circuit:

“Talk of “solidarity” — a relationship of mutual indebtedness within and across groups — seems to be all the rage these days among funder and intellectual types. Almost without exception, the ones touting the need for solidarity have college degrees (often fancy ones!). Almost without exception, they are talking about having solidarity with a multicultural “working class” of Americans without degrees. And, almost without exception, no one from this abstracted working class is in the room for these conversations (and very few are in relationship or community with these funders and intellectuals). It’s as if the working class is better kept at a distance than in proximity. It’s as if solidarity feels better as an abstract concept than a lived practice of mutuality… Without this sustained proximity and mutuality — talking about solidarity in Aspen and Cambridge but not practicing it in our communities — we’re just engaging in a new type of virtue signaling.”

There is no reason that what is true of out-of-touch liberals in Cambridge cannot also be true of out-of-touch Republicans in Palm Beach. That Democratic politics has often fallen to the temptation of bureaucratic, technocratic virtue outsourcing is news to no one. But if Republicans cannot resist the temptation of their own version, they will face the same justified revolt.