Podcast 06.25. Introduction: Microfascism in the Age of Obama, Part 5.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari diagnose fascism not merely as a macropolitical event—an authoritarian seizure of the state—but as an immanent, molecular process within subjectivities, institutions, and everyday social arrangements. Microfascism, the insidious desire for order, hierarchy, and security at the level of desire itself, operates beneath and beyond official political structures. This first episode examines how, under the Obama presidency—a period often mythologized as a triumph of liberal democracy—microfascist tendencies intensified rather than dissipated. Far from a mere reactionary backlash, these tendencies emerged within the very mechanisms of governance, media, and neoliberal discourse, forming what Deleuze and Guattari might call an "abstract machine" of control that modulated political affect. Through a rigorous analysis of the post-2008 terrain, we trace the molecular flows that conditioned new forms of subjectivation, complicity, and repression, laying the groundwork for the escalation of authoritarian tendencies in the years that followed.