Steady State Warnings: Steven Cash on America’s Drift Toward “Competitive Autocracy”
JUDJ-Prepared Summary from November 12, 2025 | The Rise of Authoritarianism in America: A Perspective From Former National Security Officials. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the speaker.
In a recent America at a Crossroads discussion, UCLA professor of law and political science Rick Hasen—one of the country’s most respected election law scholars—joined moderator Larry Mantle to break down the hidden systems that shape how American elections really work. Their conversation explored the legal architecture governing redistricting, the escalating use of partisan and racial gerrymandering, the limits of presidential power, and the structural vulnerabilities that could define the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.
Who Is Steven Cash and What Is the Steady State?
Steven Cash began his career as an attorney at the CIA before moving into operations, specializing in counterterrorism analysis focused on Hezbollah, the Balkans, and other volatile regions. He later served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and as chief counsel to Senator Dianne Feinstein, and then worked in the intelligence arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
Today, Cash is the executive director and a founder of the Steady State, a nonprofit made up of more than 100 “formers”: former CIA officers, ambassadors, senior State Department officials, and other high-ranking national security professionals. Many worked together in crises overseas, where partisan politics stayed out of the room. Their shared concern now is not left vs. right, but whether the United States remains a functioning democracy.
From Inexperience to Existential Threat
Cash described the group’s early concerns in relatively modest terms. When Donald Trump entered office, the Steady State’s founders worried first about inexperience: a president with no foreign policy background and little interest in listening to those who had it.
Their initial instinct was to help. Roughly 100 former senior officials signed letters to the incoming administration, offering their expertise to National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and later to H.R. McMaster. They never received a meaningful response. The message was clear: long experience in diplomacy, intelligence, and national security was not wanted.
For a time, Cash recalls, the group was “almost asleep,” wary of getting pulled into domestic politics at all. That changed with the revelations about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — pressing Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, while holding up crucial military aid.
“That was crossing a Rubicon,” Cash explained. This was no longer about bad judgment or clumsy diplomacy. It was the use of American power to coerce a foreign government into intervening in a U.S. election. For the Steady State, that moved the situation into the realm of an existential threat to the basic rules of American democracy.
Competitive Autocracy: The New Authoritarian Model
Cash cautioned against imagining modern dictatorship as a caricature of a lone strongman smashing institutions overnight. The contemporary model, which scholars call “competitive autocracy,” looks very different.
Autocrats in places like Russia and Hungary, he noted, didn’t abolish parliaments, courts, or elections. They kept the veneer of democracy—independent media, legislatures, courts, universities—but gradually bent those institutions to serve the leader’s interests. Laws still passed; judges still wore robes; newspapers still printed. But the outcomes were increasingly controlled.
The Steady State’s alarm comes from seeing the same pattern of pressure applied in the United States:
- Media facing regulatory and access threats if coverage displeases the White House.
- Courts and lawyers attacked and delegitimized when rulings or investigations cut against the president.
- Congress sidelined, with executive power asserted through emergency declarations and executive orders.
- Academia targeted for what can be taught and who can speak.
- Security services—FBI, CIA, DHS—purged of independent voices and refilled with personal loyalists.
These are precisely the “indicators,” Cash said, that intelligence analysts have long used to track the decline of democracy abroad. The Steady State’s basic message is simple and sobering: we’ve seen this movie before, just not here.
Why Their Warning Matters Now
Cash emphasized that the Steady State is not asking Americans to take their word on faith. Instead, they are urging citizens to recognize recognizable patterns: the politicization of security services, the hollowing out of professional diplomacy, and the steady normalization of attacks on the press, courts, and elections themselves.
What makes their voice distinctive is not partisan alignment, but professional memory. These are people trained to study how democracies die—and how autocrats hang on to power. When they say the threat has moved from mismanagement to something deeper and more dangerous, it is a warning they never expected to give about their own country.
About America at a Crossroads
Since April 2020, America at a Crossroads has produced weekly virtual programs on topics related to the preservation of our democracy, voting rights, freedom of the press, and a wide array of civil rights, including abortion rights, free speech, and free press. America at a Crossroads is a project of Jews United for Democracy & Justice.