Michael John Parenti (September 30, 1933 – January 24, 2026) was an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic who wrote on scholarly and popular subjects. He taught at universities and also ran for political office. Parenti was well known for his Marxist writings and lectures, and was an intellectual of the American Left.
Education and early life Michael Parenti was born on September 30, 1933, to an Italian-American working-class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. After graduating from high school, Parenti worked for several years. Upon returning to school, he received a BA from the City College of New York. He was awarded a teaching fellowship at Brown University where he earned an MA in history in 1957. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.
Career
Following completion of his doctorate, Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UI). In May 1970 while he was an associate professor at UI, he participated in a rally protesting the recent Kent State shootings and ongoing Vietnam War. At the rally he was severely clubbed by state troopers and then held in a jail cell for two days. He was charged with aggravated battery (of a state trooper), disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. After being released on bond, he started a new teaching job at the University of Vermont (UVM) in September. The next month he returned to Illinois to stand trial before a judge. According to Parenti, despite multiple witnesses offering exonerating testimony, the judge found him guilty on all three counts:
This incident effectively ended Parenti's career as a professor. In December 1971, after his UVM department voted unanimously to renew his teaching contract, the UVM board of trustees and conservative state legislators intervened and voted to let his contract expire, citing Parenti's "unprofessional conduct." The battle over his continued presence on the UVM faculty lasted into early 1972, but ultimately he lost his position there.
In subsequent years, he was unable to obtain another non-temporary teaching job. He learned from sympathetic associates at the colleges he applied to that he was being rejected for his leftist views and political activism. He chronicles this period of his life in the essay, "Struggles in Academe: A Personal Account", published in Dirty Truths. He discusses the broader question of political orthodoxy in U.S. higher education in "The Empire in Academia" chapter of his 1995 book, Against Empire. Because he couldn't earn a steady livelihood as a professor, Parenti began to devote himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and politics.
In 1974, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Vermont as the candidate of the democratic socialist Liberty Union Party; he finished in third place with 7.1% of the vote. During his years in Vermont, Parenti became good friends with Bernie Sanders. However, the two men later split over Sanders' support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
In the 1980s, Parenti was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. In 2003, the Caucus for a New Political Science gave him a Career Achievement Award. In 2007, he received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Representative Barbara Lee.
He served for 12 years as a judge for Project Censored. He also was on the advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network and Education Without Borders as well as the advisory editorial boards of New Political Science and Nature, Society and Thought.
In his 2001 book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Parenti decried what he considered the demonization by Western leaders of Slobodan Milošević and his Serbian Socialist Party. In 2003, Parenti became Co-Chairman for the U.S. National Section of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM). The committee was formed to urge an end to the war crimes trial of Milošević that commenced in 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Personal life and death In the last decades of his life, Parenti made his home in Berkeley, California. He was the father of Christian Parenti, an academic, author and journalist.
Parenti died at an assisted living facility in Amherst, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2026, at the age of 92.
Works
The first notable book in Parenti's writing career was Democracy for the Few. Originally published in 1974, it has since gone through nine editions and been used as a textbook in college political science courses. Democracy for the Few contains a critical analysis of the workings of American government with particular focus on the relationship between economic power and political power.
Parenti's Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (1986)The 1992 2nd edition of Inventing Reality changed the subtitle from "The Politics of the Mass Media" to "The Politics of News Media". was reviewed by multiple scholarly journals and by Michael Pollan in The New York Times. Pollan wrote: "By documenting patterns of conservative bias in a dozen major news stories in the printed and broadcast press, Inventing Reality provides a valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat of criticism of the news media from the right. Unfortunately, Mr. Parenti is so simplistic and doctrinaire in accounting for this bias that he makes his book easy to dismiss." The reviewer went on to note how the author "paints the press in such broad, Marxist strokes that he ignores many details. He cannot, for example, adequately account for episodes of courage and independence, as during Vietnam and Watergate." In a response to the review published as a Letter to the Editor, Parenti challenged Pollan's negative assessment.
Parenti continued his exploration of mass media in Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1992). The book dissects numerous popular movies and TV programs which, in Parenti's view, "have propagated images and themes that support militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and other undemocratic values." He describes what he believes is a pattern of unflattering portrayals of working-class people and trade unions,. See the chapter, "Blue-Collar Blues". and he disputes the notion that the major studios are "giving audiences what they want." Other leftist writers have been influenced by his media critiques, for instance, Tabe Bergman echoes Parenti's claim that "hegemony-undermining information and views" usually fail to get aired. In Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor, William Puette lists Parenti's seven generalizations for how the media depict labor struggles. In a 2014 article on how the news and entertainment media "sell" counterterrorism, Brigitte Nacos and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon joined with Parenti in rejecting the conservative charge that Hollywood is "a den of leftist shills", and instead argued that "Concentrated corporate ownership and the influence of Pentagon, CIA, NASA, and other government agencies on war movies in particular" were providing political entertainment to generate sympathy for the status quo and America's use of political violence. In his foreword to Matthew Alford's 2010 book Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, Parenti reiterated several of the points from Make-Believe Media.
Along with his interest in mass media's role in society, Parenti regularly published articles and books on cultural matters, e.g., "Reflections on the Politics of Culture", in which he agrees with Antonio Gramsci that culture "is largely reflective of existing hegemonic arrangements within the social order, strongly favoring some interests over others." He further develops this idea in his books Land of Idols, Superpatriotism, The Culture Struggle, and God and His Demons.
In a Los Angeles Times review, political commentator Kevin Phillips dismissed Parenti's The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (1989) as a Marxist polemic, "albeit flavored with scholarship and sprinkled with footnotes". Phillips faulted Parenti for a biased comparison of U.S. and Soviet imperialisms, and for citing sources that too often included "New York's Monthly Review Press, International Publishers, Progress Publishers of Moscow and the like. One has visions of gray East Bloc bookstores and Upper West Side of Manhattan coffeehouses."
Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power (1996) contains Parenti's most wide-ranging collection of writings. Among its essays are "Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit" on the possibility of American fascism arriving subtly and gradually rather than intruding in a nightmarish "Big Brother" fashion; "Now for the Weather" on how even TV weather reports can be politicized; and "False Consciousness" on why the lower classes sometimes adopt the opinions and attitudes of the upper classes. In two essays on the JFK assassination, he breaks ranks with fellow leftists such as Noam Chomsky by giving credence to skeptics of the official government narrative. He also explores what he calls "Conspiracy Phobia on the Left". Dirty Truths concludes with autobiographical sketches and poems.
Parenti's provocative 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism begins by examining the ideological underpinnings of European fascism in the 1920s and '30s as well as its incarnations as neofascism. He then takes the controversial position of defending the Soviet Union and other communist countries from reflexive condemnation, arguing that they featured a number of advantages over capitalist countries, e.g., by ensuring less economic inequality. He summarizes his approach in the Preface to Blackshirts and Reds: He later argues that the Soviet Union's "well-publicized deficiencies and injustices" were exacerbated by the Russian Civil War, the Nazi-led multinational invasion, and by non-military modes of capitalist intervention against the Eastern Bloc. Moreover, he claims that "pure socialists" and "left anticommunists" had failed to specify a viable alternative to the "siege socialism" implemented in the Soviet model. By offering a rare defense of 20th century Communism, Blackshirts and Reds elicited strong reactions from anarchist and Communist publications. Stephen Zunes, an international studies scholar who had previously worked with Parenti at the Institute for Policy Studies, labeled him as "an apologist for the Soviet system". Writer Alex Skopic of Current Affairs noted that Parenti accused Western scholarship of inflating the death toll under Stalin's leadership. While acknowledging that several estimates were overblown, Skopic responded that "even one life wrongfully taken in the name of socialism would be an appalling tragedy".
Yugoslavia and the Bosnian genocide
Parenti supported Milošević during the Yugoslav Wars and, according to Trip Gabriel of the New York Times, "scoffed at news reports that Bosnian Serbs had executed nearly 7,500 Bosnian Muslims in 1995 in Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina". According to the American anarchist Shon Meckfessel, Parenti also denied mass rapes had been committed by Serbian forces in the Bosnian and Kosovo Wars. The Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB), the Yugoslavia historian Marko Attila Hoare, and the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Center characterized Parenti's views as Bosnian genocide denial.