I assume this was not part of his actual class, but an extracurricular lecture.

Regardless, this is the kind of thing that would have infuriated me as a student (if, lets be honest, it didn't just put me to sleep). An overpaid professor rambling haphazardly for an hour about his personal political opinions thinly coated with some extremely vague historical context. I would like to point out exactly where I feel he went wrong here.

First and foremost, I am not sure if the lecture was originally framed in the context of the "Trump Era", but if so, it does an absolutely abysmal job of effectively drawing comparison between any of the events he references and contemporary politics. I gathered that he is effectively doing 'argumentum ad hitlerum' with a lot of big words and concepts, but he seems to do so with the assumption that we are going to automatically draw the parallells he wants us as the listener to without explicitly stating them. If, we do not inherently agree with the huge leaps in logical reasoning he makes (just for example because there are many, the Reichstag fire and 9/11 and Trump) it becomes significantly more difficult to respectfully entertain his notions.

Probably the biggest criticism I have from a historian's perspective is that his analysis seems to be entirely based on effect rather than cause. He spends little to no time examining how we got to where we are and instead focuses almost solely on what happened after the fact. Maybe someone here disagrees, that is not an approach I am familiar with.

I guess the generally smug TED talk vibe I get from this enhances my dislike of it exponentially. He refers rather obliquely and repeatedly to the "breakdown of the rule of law" without qualifying that statement. Snyder acknowledges that history and time(what a bunch of nonsense he spews about time, maybe he watched True Detective while he was writing his lecture or something) are not inherently geometric, but applies an extremely binary left-right (or north-south) paradigm to the future. His comments about extremism are also just semantic claptrap, which he quickly drops and jumps onto another vaguely contextualized anecdote predicated on the inherent correctness of his core beliefs. Which, is not really a knock against him because any historical analysis worth its salt is basically predicated upon the core beliefs of its author, but the generally insipid way in which he makes his point does neither he nor the audience any favors. It's almost like he thinks he's the smartest person in the room...

The fact that this guy is peddling this as at once educational and morally rectifying is a good example of why people are beginning to lose their patience with academics and intellectuals. Given a single topic I am sure he knows his stuff, but he is way out of his depth and he doesn't seem to care. He does himself a disservice as a historian as he attempts to make on-the-fly analysis of current events that are themselves not yet completely clear.

Good video I hope this sparks some discussion.

"Trump's America"? I'm lost already on that term. The guy just barely took the office. Come back and do this, correctly, 4 years from now dude.

I'm already tired of the desperate scramble being done to understand why Don Trump got elected. As far as I'm concerned, that's old news. Again, any planned books aren't useful or likely aren't full of any real analysis unless it's done a few years down the road. How about working on collecting relevant data, shedding that initial emotional desire for explanation and turn instead, to how the country operates given the promises made during the campaign and where those take us as that's all we have to work from.

Deckland's head is really round.