Bill And Melinda Gates, Optimistic Populists, Meet Jeff Bell, Optimistic Populist

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: Bill and Melinda Gates epitomize populism as the recently deceased Jeff Bell redefined it. As I wrote here, Bell's “optimistic populism” – which I nicknamed “Opulism” -- is at the heart of a political "Copernican revolution" struggling to be born. Populism vs. elitism is even more important than right vs. left.

Bill and Melinda Gates, perhaps to the surprise of some conservatives, are its poster children.

My recent column praised Jeff Bell, the late conservative “giant-killer” (as he was headlined in his obituary in the New York Times), for his critical-path role in tipping the first domino that precipitated a cascade of world economic growth. World GDP grew, nominally, sevenfold in the ensuing 40 years.

Bell's legacy is so epic that it's almost impossible to perceive. The pivot to an economic growth dynamic was instrumental in bringing, and continues to bring, billions of people out of dire poverty. The center-left Bill and Melinda Gates, to their great credit, astutely wield billions of dollars in humanitarian causes. The center-right Jeff Bell helped unleash trillions.

Great minds think alike.

The key takeaway from my earlier column was not Bell’s pioneering work in Supply-Side economics. It was his subtle yet transformational redefinition of populism, as laid out in his 1992 cult classic book Populism and Elitism: politics in the age of equality. This book, which the iconic political journalist Fred Barnes termed the most important political book of its year, redefined populism. As Bell summarized his thesis to Brian Lamb on Booknotes:
“Populism I see as optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs. Elitism as optimism about an elite’s ability to handle the affairs of the people, always in comparison. In other words, you might not be that optimistic about the people at a given time, but you’d be more optimistic if you were a populist than you would be about the elite’s ability to handle their problems for them. … I think the end of ruling monarchy in World War I was a greatly underrated event in its importance. I think in 1918, 1920, around that time, when the last big ruling monarchies vanished from the face of the globe – Turkey, Austria, Germany, Russia, all those monarchies disappeared at once – the world was plunged fully into the age that de Tocqueville foresaw a century earlier, and we started working out the implications of what politically equality – that nobody owns anybody else in a country – was really all about.”And as I wrote about that:Bell’s book propelled a national debate. In important ways, he anticipated politically important movements like the Tea Party. That said, the Tea Party – of which I was a member – and Occupy Wall Street, of which I was a sympathizer, even more so -- projected a grotesque caricature of Bell’s shrewd insight. Both proto-movements ended up defeating themselves by focusing their rhetorical fire on elites rather than on elitism. Big mistake.

Bell forthrightly observed, in Populism and Elitism, that a healthy society generates lots of elites. That’s a sign of success and a desirable thing. Equality implies equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. A Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution designed to punish the successful is mere demagoguery masquerading as populism.

... I contend that Bell’s most important contribution to the political discourse is his discovery, Bell's Populist Postulate: successful political campaigns revolve around optimistic populism. This discovery makes Bell the Copernicus of our upcoming Opulist political era.Side note to Melinda and Bill. You both are world class boffins and as such please do not accidentally conflate Bell’s Populist Postulate with Bell’s Theorem, described by Henry Stapp as "the most profound discovery of science." Different Bell. ‘Nuff said!

If John Bell’s Theorem is “the most profound discovery of science,” Jeff Bell’s Postulate may be “the most profound discovery of politics.” And Melinda and Bill Gates turn out to be the poster children for his optimistic populism.

In their Tenth Anniversary letter at gatesnotes, Melinda, in a sentiment the context shows is shared by Bill, states:

We’re acutely aware that some development programs in the past were led by people who assumed they knew better than the people they were trying to help. We’ve learned over the years that listening and understanding people’s needs from their perspective is not only more respectful—it’s also more effective."

We have about 1,500 employees in offices on four continents who look at the data, survey the universe of possible approaches, study what’s worked and what hasn’t, and develop strategies that we believe will maximize our impact. But one of the most important parts of their job is to listen to partners, adjust the strategies based on what they hear, and give implementers the leeway to use their expertise and their local knowledge. That’s not to say we always get it right. We don’t. But we try to approach our work with humility about what we don’t know and the determination to learn from our mistakes.

On top of relying on local partners, we also have a strong conviction about the importance of empowerment. We aren’t interested in making choices for anyone. We invest in family planning, for example, not because we have a vision of what other people’s families should look like but because parents around the world have told us they want the tools to make their vision of their own family come to fruition. In all our work, we are interested in making sure people have the knowledge and power to make the best choices for themselves."Listening and understanding people’s needs from their perspective is not only more respectful—it’s also more effective" is the quintessence of Optimistic Populism. Yet as America’s greatest spiritual guide, the late Yogi Berra, once pointed out “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is.” So ... how is Opulism working out in practice?

The evidence is compelling that the Gates Foundation funding the battle against infectious diseases has saved many tens of millions of children’s lives. Melinda Gates:

We’ve spent $15.3 billion on vaccines over the past 18 years. And it’s been a terrific investment. Better immunization is one reason why the number of children who die has gone down by so much, from almost 10 million in 2000 to 5 million last year. That’s 5 million families that didn’t have to suffer the trauma of losing a daughter or a son, a sister or a brother.To which she adds, in a fetching marginal note, “This is our favorite anti-pessimist statistic.”

As for optimism, the Gates jointly write:

Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.

Compare today to the way things were a decade or a century ago. The world is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.

But being an optimist isn’t about knowing that life used to be worse. It’s about knowing how life can get better. And that’s what really fuels our optimism. Although we see a lot of disease and poverty in our work—and many other big problems that need to be solved—we also see the best of humanity. We spend our time learning from scientists who are inventing cutting-edge tools to cure disease. We talk to dedicated government leaders who are being creative about prioritizing the health and well-being of people around the world. And we meet brave and brilliant individuals all over the world who are imagining new ways to transform their communities.

That’s our response when people ask, “How can you be so optimistic?” It’s a question we’ve been getting more and more, and we think the answer says a lot about how we view the world.The Gates Foundation is doing a lot more humanitarian work in other areas, some more successful than others. Its failures are a sign that it is taking calculated risks that neither “the” government nor the private sector can. As Bill puts it:Even though our foundation is the biggest in the world, the money we have is very small compared to what businesses and governments spend. For example, California spends more than our entire endowment just to run its public school system for one year.

So we use our resources in a very specific way: to test out promising innovations, collect and analyze the data, and let businesses and governments scale up and sustain what works. We’re like an incubator in that way. We aim to improve the quality of the ideas that go into public policies and to steer funding toward those ideas that have the most impact.

There’s another issue at the heart of this question. If we think it’s unfair that we have so much wealth, why don’t we give it all to the government? The answer is that we think there’s always going to be a unique role for foundations. They’re able to take a global view to find the greatest needs, take a long-term approach to solving problems, and manage high-risk projects that governments can’t take on and corporations won’t. If a government tries an idea that fails, someone wasn’t doing their job. Whereas if we don’t try some ideas that fail, we’re not doing our jobs.The Gates Foundation's willingness to absorb the inevitable attendant failures of taking calculated risks brings the heart of an entrepreneur to philanthropy. This is a great thing. And yes, there are some ideological paradoxes at work. As Niels Bohr once said, "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."

I contend that much of the overwhelming “noise-to-signal” ratio now coming from the political sphere is an artifact of the breakdown of the old Cold War paradigm. That was a narrative of (good) Capitalism vs. (evil) Communism, (good) Liberal Republicanism vs. (evil) Totalitarianism, (good) Liberty vs. (evil) Coercion. It was nicely organized into a taxonomy of (good) Conservatives vs. (evil) Leftists.

Once upon a time, that narrative served us very well. But now that we are beginning to assimilate the implications of the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, it no longer makes perfect sense. In fact, it sometimes verges into Jabberwocky.

Yes, of course, speaking as an archconservative, the right still stands for All Things Good, the left for All Things Evil. And yet, from a post-Cold War perspective, right vs. left begins to resemble Mad Magazine’s "Spy vs. Spy." To normal citizens we politicos surely resemble cartoon characters apparently identical in all ways but for the color of our robes.

In "Spy vs. Spy" we engage in intensely surreal violent booby-trapping of one another. But ... how exactly is this Forever War between us calculated to bring about a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, or secure the Blessings of Liberty? Just asking.

With the breakdown of the Cold War paradigm we need a new meta-narrative to give meaning to our lives and to our politics. For politics and thus government to make sense again, we need to realize that, politically speaking. the Earth – meaning politics -- goes around the Sun – meaning the people. While this runs against the progressive and the neoconservative exaltation of government, the exaltation of society -- the people -- over government is the new tide of history.

Jeff Bell pierced the venerable illusion of political Geocentricity, propounding in its stead political Heliocentricity. That is why I construe Bell’s Populist Postulate as a theoretical breakthrough of historic importance.

His redefinition of populism overthrows an antiquated Ptolemaic order of government-centric people, a presumption that people are better off dependent upon and subservient to the state. It replaces that with a Copernican paradigm of people-centric government designed with the predicate that people can better manage their own affairs than can an elite such as the government.

In summary, Bell’s Populist Postulate: successful political campaigns revolve around optimistic populism, optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs.

Call it Opulism. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

There proof that that Opulism works in practice as well as theory: Melinda and Bill Gates.

The millions of lives they have saved by listening and supporting rather than by directing is why they are exemplary of how optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs can work.

They, and their Foundation, have many more humanitarian initiatives being executed or incubated in their elegantly populist fashion. Stay tuned.

For more specifics, begin here. Do not expect to find panaceas. Find, rather, inquisitive spirits infused with humility in search of pragmatic solutions to real-world problems. Such is the stuff of humanitarian progress.

Like me, you might find it a refreshing change from most politics as currently practiced.

Meanwhile, thank you, Jeff Bell, for discovering Opulism.

And thank you, Bill and Melinda Gates, for proving that Opulism works and brilliantly.
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

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