Since the late 1920s, one party alone, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, has ruled Mexico, putting up a new President every six years in a cut-and-dried election. Some people might label it dictatorship. Mexicans call it "guided democracy," and by some alchemy the system does seem to operate as a sort of national consensus. Last week Mexico's President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz marched to the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies to make his first state-of-the-nation address after nine months in office. His speech was a remarkable definition of Mexico's sense of stability, leadership and nationhood.
For almost three hours he spoke, finding...