Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown, a co-editor of Dissent and the author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.”

The Great Recession and its frustrating aftermath spawned the Tea Party and the Occupy movement – bands of dedicated activists who agree about nothing but the need to transform the political system. Both movements grew quickly, aided by their own creative tactics and the news media’s rapt attention. Each one forced office-holders and aspiring candidates to address their concerns and adopt some of their rhetoric – whether “protect the Constitution” or “We are the 99 percent.”

So why, less than three months before the election, do only the Tea Partiers wield a major influence on American politics?

A big reason is that the main purpose of these conservative activists was always to elect right-wing stalwarts who could thwart President Obama’s “socialist” programs. And, from the first, they could draw on wealthy contributors like the Koch brothers and experienced advisers like Richard Armey....

Kiff Hamp is a graduate student at the University of Michigan Law School and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

...In debating the constitutionality of rights given to, and taken from, African Americans throughout the history of our country, lawyers, legal scholars and historians have debated the concept of a "colorblind Constitution." Most Americans know the term from Justice John Marshall Harlan's famous one-man dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which he stated: "Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." In fact, the term was used in a similar way in the decades before the Civil War by abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass and Sen. Charles Sumner.

The idea of constitutional colorblindness is still used in modern legal discourse, often in debates regarding affirmative action. Today individuals opposed to affirmative action argue, in part, that our Constitution does not allow for special assistance for minorities because the document makes no mention of color or distinction among races....

The colorblind-Constitution theory, at first glance, seems to provide a compelling argument for equality. But despite its historical roots in the abolition movement, it doesn't actually work as a remedy for discrimination against African Americans. The key concept behind the original colorblind argument made by 19th-century abolitionists was equality before the law; their vision was of a country in which nobody saw color, so everyone, it would follow, would be inherently equal.

While this is certainly an ideal for which to strive, the problem with that view today is that African Americans were subjected to decades of discrimination and unfair treatment, even after the abolition of slavery, during the repeal of Reconstruction, through the birth of Jim Crow in the 1890s and continuing throughout much of the 20th century. Today the case can certainly be made that African Americans are "facially equal" to white Americans. But because they were so disadvantaged by decades of discrimination, simply removing race from our national discourse and providing no remedial help to people who were historically and systematically disadvantaged simply cannot lead to true equality....

Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.

It would be bad enough, as I reported last week, that 47 billionaires were responsible for the lion’s share of individual Super PAC contributions. It turns out that the Super PACs aren’t even the biggest players.

The biggest players are the dark money PACs, which do not have to reveal the sources of their funding.

If we just look at the television ads bankrolled by the top six sources of funding, we make a startling discovery, which Kim Barker reported on in these pages last week.

The ‘dark money’ PACs are outspending everyone else. Crossroads GPS, founded by Karl Rove and backed by anonymous big-money donors, has bought negative attack ads against President Obama to the tune of $52 million! The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity spent $20.6 million. The political parties and the Super PACs, which have to identify the source of their funds, are making a much smaller contribution....

Tad Daley is the author of Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (Rutgers University Press), soon in paperback. He is currently working on a new book about the history and future of the ancient idea that something like a world republic could serve as the solution to the problem of war.

A reflection on:
Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement
Lawrence Wittner
272 pages, $21.95

In 2011, people across the planet reached out to Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. Millions watched as one nation after another rose in mass revolutions across the Arab world. The Occupy movement blossomed, as citizens in cities around the globe expressed rage over the excesses of capitalism and corporate power. And Time magazine named "The Protester" its annual Person of the Year.

The world has never been smaller. Citizen movements increasingly demonstrate their limitless promise. So, think it sounds too dreamy to imagine that someday people power might transform our small world into one world -- a united republic of Earth?

Then read Lawrence Wittner's 2009 book, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. And think again.

Dawn of a movement. Confronting the Bomb is a condensation of Wittner's epic, three-volume masterpiece of historical research, The Struggle Against the Bomb. An overarching message of the book will surprise even nuclear policy experts, because Wittner starts with an incontrovertible historical fact almost wholly forgotten today: For the first several years of the nuclear age, the ultimate aspiration of the disarmament crowd was not just to eliminate nuclear arsenals, but to create a federal republic of the world....

Jim Sleeper lectures in political science at Yale and posts frequently at TPM. He has been a New York newspaper columnist and is the author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism.

A few hours ago Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.

But the offense does not end there. Zakaria is a trustee of Yale, which takes a very dim view of plagiarism and suspends or expels students who commit anything like what he has committed here. If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.

Worse still: Lepore, whom Zakaria wronged by misappropriating her work, is herself a Yale PhD. If anyone knows what it means to steal another scholar's work, it's Zakaria, who holds a PhD from Harvard.

Zakaria is a busy man, of course. Although he's been judged by The New Republic to be one of America's "most-overrated thinkers," he was interviewed about the state of the world last year by Yale President Richard Levin before a large audience at the kick-off off Yale's $50 million Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, the new home of "Professor" Stanley McChrystal and of what Lewis Lapham has called "the arts and sciences of career management," including mastery of "the exchange rate between an awkward truth and a user-friendly lie."

Zakaria was Harvard's commencement speaker this June and, as Paul Starobin reported in the Columbia Journalism Review, he's also very busy collecting his standard speaking fee of $75,000 for talks he gives to at Baker Capital, Catterton Partners, Driehaus Capital Management, ING, Merrill Lynch, Oak Investment Partners, Charles Schwab, and T. Rowe Price.

Might Zakaria then have fobbed off the drafting of his ill-fated Time article to an assistant or intern (from Yale, perhaps?) and given the draft his glancing approval before letting it run under his byline in Time? Whatever the truth, he couldn't have fobbed off the blame on anyone but himself, and so he has issued his clipped but "unreserved" apology to Lepore.

He should also apologize to Yale. Last April Yale's trustees, under fire for their ill-conceived venture to establish a new liberal arts college bearing Yale's name in collaboration with the authoritarian city-state of Singapore, wheeled in their fellow trustee and favorite journalist, Zakaria, to write a column defending the venture in the Yale Daily News that, I wrote here in Huffington Post at the time, then read as if it had been written by a wind-up toy of Zakaria at his self-important, elitist worst.

After parsing the new Singapore college's prospective East-West syllabus with affectations of an erudition he doesn't possess, Zakaria, a consummate player of the "Third World card" against Westerners who dare to criticize his Davos neo-liberalism, discovered in the Singapore venture's Yale faculty critics "a form of parochialism bordering on chauvinism -- on the part of supposedly liberal and open-minded intellectuals" who, he wrote, can't "see that we too, in America and at Yale, can learn something from Singapore."

I've since had several occasions to explain what exactly we're learning from Singapore, as well as to note Zakaria's bad habit of resorting to elitist, snarky put-downs of his critics. Last summer, he lit into a leftist critic of President Obama, the academic psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen, by telling Charlie Rose, "I'm not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this."

Zakaria -- who hasn't run for dogcatcher, either, but doesn't hesitate to advise presidents -- can't help himself at such moments, and he hasn't been able to help himself now, either. As long as he remains a Yale trustee, he will remain a sad example of Yale's own transformation from a crucible of civic-republican leadership for America and the world into a global career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new elite that answers to no polity or moral code and that aggrandizes itself by plucking the fruits of others' work.

Lawrence B. Glickman is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author most recently of “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.” The opinions expressed are his own.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, regularly invokes free enterprise, which he has called “one of the greatest forces for good this world has ever known.”

Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s recently announced running mate, uses the phrase even more frequently. In his very first speech as Romney’s selection, he called for a return to the founding principles of “liberty, freedom, free enterprise.”...

In using this language, the two are part of a long tradition, one that helps explain how Americans have frequently mythologized the role of the “free market” and downplayed that of government in our dynamic economic system.

Ever since the term “free enterprise” was popularized by the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1930s, critics of the New Deal and its legacy have been issuing urgent warnings. Lacking a positive definition, the idea of free enterprise has been expressed largely through a language of fear and loss.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is co-editor, with Angilee Shah, of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Lands, which will be published next month by the University of California Press. He will join other contributors to the volume, including Dissent author Megan Shank, for a book launch event at New York’s Asia Society on September 17 (details here).

As Britain basks in the glow of its successful Olympics, the thought that comes to this China specialist’s mind is, what a difference four years makes. There is a striking contrast indeed, where China is concerned, between the largely positive international chatter about that country in mid-2008, as the Beijing Games concluded, and the largely negative buzz about it now.

The change in China’s fortunes has little to do with medal counts or world records. Still, a look back to the Beijing Games helps place then-and-now contrasts into sharp relief.

Plenty of criticisms were leveled at China’s leaders just before the 2008 Olympics over issues such as repression in Tibet, and the Games were hardly free of controversy either, thanks to complaints about everything from parts of the opening ceremonies being faked (for example, the fireworks that looked like footprints in the sky being doctored digital effects) to underage gymnasts competing on the Chinese team. And yet, overall, a lot of things went right for the Party four years ago. As a result, a good number of international observers came away from China’s first Olympics seeing the country much as its leaders desperately want it to be seen: as a country that is respectful of its past yet surging toward a prosperous future; that is no longer poor, chaotic, isolated, with leaders prone to ideological extremism, personality cult rule, and factional infighting.

The “Bird’s Nest” and other new arenas looked great on television, fostering the notion that China can build things quickly and well, an idea further buttressed by headlines in the following years about new high speed trains going into operation. Even the weather cooperated four years ago, in part, the Party claimed, because of the skillful use it made of sci-fi methods to hasten or delay rainfall as needed. Most important of all, the 2008 opening ceremonies, while not without critics complaining about such things as a bait-and-switch technique that had us see one girl singing while hearing another one’s voice, was an eye-popping spectacle and left the impression on many viewers that the Party was striving to convey. The extravaganza began with a quote from Confucius, back in favor by 2008 after being denigrated by the Party as recently as the 1970s, and ended with a symbolic nod to China’s space program. It contained no direct allusions to the Mao years (1949-1976) or indeed any twentieth-century event, but red flags filled the stadium and Hu Jintao presided over the event, so no one could forget that the Party was running the show and, as the quote from Confucius put it, taking pleasure in welcoming friends from afar. The gala wowed a big crowd of eyewitnesses, which included top world leaders such as Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, and was watched on screens all over the world.

Flash forward to 2012 and we find many contrasts.

The biggest recent Chinese weather story, for example, is the devastating floods that hit Beijing last month. These not only cost people their lives but also undermined the state media’s already tenuous credibility, since rumors flew early on that the loss of life was being grossly underreported.

Similarly, the big infrastructure story this summer has not been about impressive structures but rather the inability of the capital’s sewers to handle the water from torrential rains. This led some Chinese bloggers to mock the authorities for spending too much on showy buildings and too little on the basic things that matter to most people. In doing so, as in questioning the reliability of state media reports on the flood, these bloggers picked up on themes that figured centrally in the important flurry of online commentary triggered a year ago by a high-speed train crash and clumsy government efforts to cover up what had gone wrong.

And when it comes to China’s relations with foreign countries, the focus now is not on its ability to play the gracious host but on Beijing’s proclivity to act like a regional hegemon in disputes over small islands claimed by more than one country.

The most striking difference between four years ago and today, however, has to do with the carefully scripted Chinese dramas enacted while each of the last two Summer Games were being televised. Whereas in August 2008, we had Zhang Yimou’s cast-of-thousands spectacle staged out in the open in China’s capital, last week there were quick and dirty proceedings in a provincial courtroom—something that might best be described, oxymoronically, as a highly secretive show trial, with only a small handful of foreign observers allowed to watch the proceedings in person.

The goal of this drama was to prove that Gu Kailai, who had once been lionized as a successful lawyer and businesswoman and is the wife of the recently purged Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, was a vile if pitiable individual. According to official reports, she has confessed to the crime of conspiring with one of her employees to poison Neil Heywood, a mysterious Englishman whom she had once viewed as a trusted helper of her family but supposedly later came to fear posed a danger to her son.

The trial, like earlier events involving Bo and members of his family, have led some commentators inside and outside of China to question the notion that Chinese politics has really undergone a sea change since the 1970s. In criticizing Bo, other Chinese leaders have claimed that his efforts to build a personal following were too similar for comfort to things that Mao had done during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976). In the eyes of some, though, it is the way Bo has been attacked and Gu has been turned into a scapegoat that bring to mind the infighting and intrigue of an earlier era.

What are we to make of the contrasting global chatter on China in 2008 and 2012? Surely it is partly due to the many ways that the country has changed in the in the last four years, some of which I have written about in this publication. To cite just one shift, upticks in online complaints and protests relating to environmental concerns show that there are more Chinese citizens now questioning the government’s claim that the existence of faster trains (that may be dangerous) and more goods on supermarket shelves (that may be unsafe to eat) are sufficient proof that the quality of life is steadily improving.

There are two other factors, though, that contribute to the dramatic shift from 2008 to 2012.

One of these is the enduring tendency in the West to swing between viewing China in either an overly admiring or overly disparaging way. Perry Anderson, writing in the London Review of Books in 2010, referred to this as the competing pulls of Sinomania and Sinophobia. Anderson stressed the distorting effects of both kinds of emotionally charged views of China. He also notes that sometimes Sinomania and Sinophobia can become intertwined. He cites as an example the seemingly phobic (from its title) but actually largely admiring (in its approach) When China Rules the World, which sold well when the afterglow of the Beijing Games was still strong. Similarly, looking back, we can see that even in some commentaries praising China in 2008, there was an undercurrent of anxiety, a sense that there was something disturbing about all those drummers moving in lockstep in the opening ceremony—that what we were seeing on our screens was too good to be true, that all those new buildings could be symbols of a bubble economy.

In 2008 many viewers around the world were dazzled, as the Chinese government hoped they would be, by a ready-for-primetime Beijing that seemed as magical as the Emerald City had to Dorothy when she first encountered it. In 2012, however, as Geremie Barmé put it in an Australian ABC television interview on Bo’s fall and Gu’s trial, we have gotten a “Wizard of Oz moment,” a chance to glimpse things that we were not supposed to know existed. Beijing is proving to be a different place than the one that looked so good on television four years ago. It turns out to have sewers that don’t operate the way that they should. And it turns out to contain leaders who, all talk of harmony aside, are not immune to the kind of factional divides and rough-and-tumble score-settling that we were told were part of the old New China of Mao but not the sleek PRC 2.0 of today.

Joseph Loconte, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt.

(CNN) The ancient Greeks, especially the frugal Spartans, would probably balk at the commercialism that saturates our modern Olympic Games. And it’s doubtful that either badminton or beach volleyball would satisfy their appetite for blood-and-guts competition.

Yet we share something with the Greeks every time we assemble for this great athletic contest: a desire to transcend the politics of the moment and reach beyond the ordinary limits of human achievement. That desire has been on full display during the London Summer Games.

Begun in 776 BC, the Olympic Games soon became so important to Greek life that conflicts between participating Greek city-states, which were constantly squabbling with one another, would be suspended until after the games. The great historian Thucydides described one such scene in his classic history of the Peloponnesian War....