Departure puts end to Reagan era

Carlos Alberto Montaner

George W. Bush leaves office with a high level of popular disapproval. Americans think that he's basically a good man but a failed president. They might be right in both assessments.

Of the three basic responsibilities a president assumes in liberal democracies -- to protect citizens' lives, liberty and property -- the third one was a noisy failure for Bush. During his term, public spending shot up irresponsibly, capped by the greatest destruction of capital since the 1929 Crash.

While none of that would have happened without the complicity of a mostly Democratic Congress (at least in recent time), the so-called ''judgment of history'' is passed on the president, not on the legislative apparatus.

In his brief farewell speech, Bush clung to his greatest success: preventing another terrorist attack like the one on Sept. 11, 2001. Actually, that's no small feat. It seems that the U.S. security forces discovered and dismantled several serious attempts at sabotage and terrorist acts plotted by al Qaeda, but even those police triumphs were costly, in terms of civil rights. The government even was forced to defend its claimed right to wring confessions from detainees through water-boarding torture.

Traditionally, the water torture -- perfected and regulated by the Spanish Inquisition -- consisted of immobilizing the prisoner face up on a wooden board, inserting a cloth in his mouth and pouring water on his face incessantly, thus provoking a continuing and panicking sensation of asphyxia. Usually, the accused confessed to anything, so long as the torture ceased.

In Guantánamo and other detention centers, interrogators probably used a simpler but equally sinister procedure. They aimed a constant stream of water at the nostrils, or pushed the prisoner's head into a pail full of water. Fortunately, Obama's government has stated that it will put an end to that atrocious method of questioning detainees.

What is the legacy of the Bush administration? In my judgment, something that never went through his head when he assumed the presidency: he leaves the country psychologically prepared to adopt the model of a European state, with increasing quotas of state intervention, which will be inevitably reflected in greater fiscal pressure and a loss of dynamism.

More and more Americans desire to enjoy a public and universal system of healthcare, even if it is mediocre. And more Americans prefer to count exclusively on retirement funds managed by the state rather than submit themselves to the market's vagaries.

Somehow, and at least for now, Bush's departure marks the end of the Ronald Reagan era and the discourse of a reduced government and the supremacy of civilian society. Suddenly, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, agree to try to palliate the economic crisis through the injection of a torrent of money and a boundless increase in public spending.

From the ''supply-side economics'' postulated by the theoreticians of Reaganism and sustained during Clinton's two terms, we have returned to the ''demand economics'' and the Keynesian idea (a profoundly pernicious one) that the state's budget is the right instrument to prevent recessive cycles and stimulate employment.

Few if any voices are heard in defense of savings, of balanced budgets and the state's neutrality in the face of economic competence. Almost everyone applauds when money is taken from taxpayers to save enterprises that the consumers reject -- as happened in the United States with the great automotive industry -- and the available resources are arbitrarily reassigned, thus harming other productive sectors. And nobody is shocked when the printing presses work overtime to churn out bills, because they assume that some of those bills will drift their way.

Bush never imagined that his legacy was the transformation of The American Dream. With Obama, The European Dream begins on this side of the Atlantic.