In 1972, a thirty-eight-year-old political scientist named Michael Parenti stood before a congressional subcommittee and told its members, plainly and without diplomatic softening, that American democracy was functioning more or less as designed, and that the design served the few at the expense of the many. He was not invited back. His academic career had already been derailed; the University of Vermont had denied him tenure despite strong student support, a decision many of his colleagues attributed less to scholarly merit than to the discomfort his ideas produced in the people positioned to reward or punish them.
He took it as a kind of proof of his thesis.
For the next five decades, Parenti worked largely outside the institutions that confer respectability: without a tenured chair, without regular access to major op-ed pages, without the rotating television appearances that make certain intellectuals into household names. He wrote prolifically anyway. He lectured everywhere that would have him. And he built, gradually and without official blessing, one of the most devoted audiences in the American left.
His death closes that chapter. What it should not close is the argument he spent his life making.
Among his most characteristic observations, paraphrased here from interviews and lectures rather than drawn from any single verified source, was something like this: The powerful don't lose sleep over poverty, illness, or homelessness. What unsettles them is what you think. Once people understand how power works, it becomes much harder to maintain.
That is the core of Parenti's worldview, and it is worth sitting with before dismissing it. He was not arguing that elites are indifferent to suffering out of personal cruelty, though some may be. He was making a structural claim: that systems of concentrated power can absorb enormous amounts of public misery without being destabilized by it. Poverty, inadequate healthcare, stagnant wages, widening inequality, these are tolerable, even manageable, from the vantage point of entrenched power. What is not tolerable is an informed citizenry that understands who benefits from existing arrangements and why.
For Parenti, the deepest struggle in any society was never simply over resources. It was over consciousness.
This is why institutions that shape public opinion have always mattered so much. Every ruling class in history has grasped that force alone is an inefficient way to govern. It is far easier, and far more durable, to persuade people that the existing order is natural, inevitable, or even just, than to compel their obedience through coercion. The most powerful forms of control are often the least visible. They work not through commands but through assumptions: the stories a society tells itself about what is normal, what is possible, and what is simply out of the question.
That observation feels more urgent now than it did when Parenti first made it.
Over recent decades, ownership of major media outlets has become dramatically concentrated. A small number of corporations and billionaires now shape what millions of people read, watch, and discuss. Social media platforms that once promised to democratize information have become powerful gatekeepers in their own right, amplifying certain voices, quietly marginalizing others, and doing so through algorithms whose logic remains largely opaque to the public they influence.
This influence rarely operates through direct censorship. The subtler mechanism is agenda-setting: which stories get attention, which crises are treated as emergencies and which are allowed to quietly fester, which assumptions go unexamined, which perspectives are presented as serious and which are dismissed before they can be properly considered. These choices shape public understanding in ways that rarely announce themselves.
The result is a society drowning in information but starved of context. We are invited to focus on personalities rather than systems, scandals rather than structures, symptoms rather than causes. The flood of content creates the impression of an informed public while frequently obscuring the deeper forces at work.
Parenti saw this coming long before the age of algorithmic feeds and billionaire-owned platforms. Controlling information, he understood, doesn't require silencing every dissenting voice. It only requires generating enough noise, distraction, and confusion that serious challenges to power can never quite gain their footing.
This does not mean every journalist is captured or every outlet acts in bad faith. Many reporters continue to do essential, courageous work. But individual integrity does not dissolve structural realities. Ownership matters. Incentives matter. Concentrated power over public discourse matters, regardless of the intentions of those working within it.
What Parenti grasped most clearly was this: the powerful are often less interested in controlling what people do than in controlling what people believe. If citizens can be convinced that inequality is inevitable, that great wealth reflects great merit, or that meaningful reform is simply beyond reach, the status quo needs no defending. It defends itself.
And what elites fear is not anger. Anger can be redirected, absorbed, even monetized. What they fear is understanding, the kind that leads people to ask the questions power least wants asked. Who benefits? Who decides? Why are some policies treated as sacred common sense while others are declared impossible? Why do certain voices flood the public square while others can barely get inside the door?
Those questions are dangerous precisely because they don't attack the powerful directly. They undermine the legitimacy on which power depends.
Parenti spent a lifetime encouraging people to ask them, from the margins, without institutional support, and with a clarity that made his exclusion from respectable discourse feel, in retrospect, rather revealing.
As his legacy is assessed, his deepest concern should not be reduced to economic inequality or political corruption, though he cared about both. It was something more fundamental: the subtle machinery through which power perpetuates itself by shaping what people believe to be true, natural, and beyond challenge.
In an era defined by media consolidation, algorithmic curation, and concentrations of private wealth without modern precedent, that concern reads less like a relic of the last century and more like a diagnosis of this one.
Power is most secure when it remains invisible.
The moment people begin to see it, really see it, its grip starts to give. And that, more than poverty or protest or any policy agenda, is what the powerful have always feared most.
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