Michael John Parenti (born September 30, 1933) is an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at universities as well as run for political office.[1] Parenti is well known for his Marxist writings and lectures,[2][3] and is an intellectual of the American Left.[4]
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.[8]
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. Despite multiple witnesses exonerating Parenti, the judge found him guilty on all three counts. Here's how he describes what happened next:
In June 1971 I returned to Illinois for sentencing. Because I was already employed outside the state and because a host of academic lights from around the country had sent in appeals on my behalf, I was saved from having to do time. Instead, I was given two years probation, a fine, and ordered to pay court costs.[8]
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 not renew, citing Parenti's "unprofessional conduct."[9] The battle over his continued presence on the UVM faculty lasted into early 1972, but ultimately he lost his position there.[10]
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.[11]
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.[12][13] 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.[14][15]
He served for 12 years as a judge for Project Censored.[17] He also is 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.[18][19]
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.[24]
As a rule, Parenti's books were not reviewed in mainstream publications. The one exception was Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (1986)[25] which was reviewed by multiple scholarly journals[26][27][28] 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."[29]
In a response to the review published as a Letter to the Editor, Parenti challenged Pollan's negative assessment.[30]
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."[31] He describes what he believes is a pattern of unflattering portrayals of working-class people and trade unions, and he disputes the notion that the major studios are "giving audiences what they want."[32] 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. Other leftist writers have been influenced by his media critiques.[33][34]
Along with his interest in mass media's role in society, Parenti has regularly published articles and books on cultural matters, e.g., "Reflections on the Politics of Culture", in which he echoes Antonio Gramsci that culture "is largely reflective of existing hegemonic arrangements within the social order, strongly favoring some interests over others."[35] He further develops this idea in his books Land of Idols, Superpatriotism, The Culture Struggle, and God and His Demons.[36][37]
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.[38] 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.[39] He also explores what he calls "Conspiracy Phobia on the Left".[40]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:
This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of “democratic capitalism” to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anti-communism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.[41]
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.[42] By offering a rare defense of 20th century socialism, Blackshirts and Reds has elicited strong reactions from anarchist and leftist publications.[43][44]
Appearances in media
Apart from video recordings of his public speaking engagements,[45][46] Parenti has also appeared in the 1992 documentary The Panama Deception, and in the 2004 Liberty Bound and 2013 Fall and Winter documentaries as an author and social commentator.[47][48]
In July 2003, Parenti was invited on the C-SPANBooknotes program to discuss his latest work, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.[49][50] He appeared in an episode of the Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, speaking briefly about the Dalai Lama (Episode 305 – Holier Than Thou).[51]
Because of his research for the book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (2000) and his travel in the war-torn region shortly after the NATO bombing, Parenti was interviewed in Boris Malagurski's documentary film The Weight of Chains (2010) and its sequel The Weight of Chains 2 (2014) about the former Yugoslavia.[52][53]
