It’s good to follow up on things one’s written, assessing what was right or wrong, and what’s changed since. Here are some thoughts along those lines:
Biden wasn’t a super ager. I wrote in February 2024 that Joe Biden might be a “cognitive super ager,” one of those people who “markedly defy expectations of cognitive decline.” His performance in the June debate convinced me he’d lost mental agility and physical stamina to a degree that running for re-election was folly; I called for Kamala Harris to become the candidate, and soon after hoped Biden would resign. If I’d known that Barack Obama didn’t think she could win, I’d have wanted a mini-primary or open convention (though Biden passing the presidency to her would’ve still been a good move).
Trump’s authoritarianism is even worse than I thought. During the campaign, I worried that Donald Trump “relentlessly seeks to degrade institutions into subservience to his untrammeled personal interests, and chose a running mate who’s stated he’d have abetted overturning an election, including by disregarding the Supreme Court.” I noted: “Various putative checks and balances, from Congress, the judiciary, state governments or non-governmental entities, have weaknesses that a determined autocrat could overcome. A particular concern is that an executive branch ignoring court orders—precisely what [J.D.] Vance has advocated—doesn’t have any clear countermeasure in our system.”
Those concerns were valid, but the reality’s gone beyond them. I didn’t anticipate, for example, that the administration would send people to a torture prison in a foreign dictatorship, based on uncorroborated suspicions of gang membership and a bogus claim the gang’s engaged in government-backed hostilities (though I intuited that the “invasion” rhetoric could lead to some kind of authoritarian measure). I anticipated that Trump would be vindictive toward various critics and enemies, but didn’t expect executive orders targeting specific organizations and individuals in a way that defiles the Constitution.
American science is in trouble. My science coverage didn’t anticipate the turmoil and repression the second Trump administration would bring to science, with massive budget cuts, layoffs, and assaults on academic freedom and the integrity of federal research. The U.S. has been the world leader in science, with vast economic and technological benefits, since World War II, and that status is now in jeopardy.
So are America’s alliances. I anticipated that America’s alliances would weaken in a second Trump term, though I didn’t imagine the degree of breakdown signified by hostile American claims against Greenland and Canada. The economic and geopolitical tumult of Trump’s tariff war surprised me as well.
AI: Still not sure how transformative. My articles on artificial intelligence have expressed ambivalence about its impact, plus some skepticism about claims AI will transform the world or destroy humanity. A new analysis, called AI 2027, anticipating intense—possibly apocalyptic—change in the next few years, strikes me as overblown. Still, I wouldn’t be inclined to place bets on possible AI developments.
Space: Reflecting problems on Earth. I recently wrote for The Unpopulist about pressures toward autocracy and oligarchy in space, noting that this was a turn from my 1990s optimism about the liberatory potential of space technology and prospective colonies. My Splice Today pieces on space over the years have been more restrained in their ebullience, though only gradually reflecting a disillusionment, in particular with Elon Musk and his dubious plans and conflicts of interest.
Back to Earth, and going back a few years, I was wrong to see the prospective 2020 election as “Twilight of a Right-Wing Era” or to be confident that “Trump Will Leave If He Loses.” But I was ahead of the curve in praising “The Merits of Standardized Tests,” before the backlash against them had subsided. I’ve now written over 250 articles for Splice Today, somewhere around 200,000 words; some right, some wrong.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky
