ited States, the 1980s were the boom years, a period in which disbelief was willingly suspended, and the sky seemed to be the limit. As the boom has evaporated, in the early 1990s, euphoria has been followed by a grim realization that the seemingly limitless possibilities of the 1980s were never, in fact, what they were widely promoted and even more widely believed to be.
In the United States, one consequence of the unravelling of the boom has been a fraying of the previous political consensus. The Ross Perot phenomenon during the first half of the 1992 election season was an indicator of the degree of disaffection, an indicator reinforced by the success of other protest candidacies (e.g., Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown in both established parties, candidacies that would previously have been relegated to the fringes. Throughout the 1980s, a conservative Republican agenda dominated national affairs, and the GOP fondly believed that every election would bring "realignment" in the form of a Republican national majority. Instead, midway through the 1992 election, continued Republican control of the White House seemed seriously in doubt.
A similar disaffection could be detected in Mexican political life, a disaffection potentially severe because of the nature of the Mexican political system, at once more centralized and more fragile than that of the United States. If the GOP lost the White House, it appeared (at least after Ross Perot's abandonment of his campaign) that it would simply pass to another long established alignment, the Democratic Party. If the PRI were to lose control of the Mexican presidency, its only possible replacements would be protest movements having a narrow and uncertain national base.
Yet a loss of the PRI's grip on Mexican politics has appeared to be a real possibility in the course of the 1980s. In the 1985 mid term elections, only fraud on an unusually massive scale preserved...