Progressive Indiana Network: https://progressiveindiana.net
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The Steady State: https://thesteadystate.org/
SUMMARY:
In this conversation, Scott sits down with Steven Cash — former CIA officer, former senior advisor to the DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence, chief counsel to Senator Dianne Feinstein, and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — and current Executive Director of The Steady State, a nonpartisan group of more than 400 former senior national security professionals opposing authoritarianism. It’s an unlikely pairing for a democratic socialist podcast — Scott says as much up front — but the conversation is a wide-ranging, credentialed walk through what competitive authoritarianism is, how the current administration matches the indicators intelligence professionals have spent careers watching for in other countries, and what ordinary people can actually do about it. Cash traces his own path from a reluctant CIA recruit in 1994 through the founding of The Steady State in 2016, addresses foreign interference in American elections, and lays out concrete, non-partisan advice: get smart, organize, vote, and — for those with the most privilege and least personal risk — carry the burden for the people who don’t have that luxury.
WHAT’S INSIDE:
00:00:23 Introduction: Small-L Liberal Democracy, Strange Bedfellows, and Tonight’s Guest
- Scott frames the moment: for most of modern history, political debate happened within a shared small-l liberal democratic consensus — free elections, rule of law, separation of powers, protected civil liberties. Trump and MAGA have embraced illiberalism, pushing the U.S. toward what experts call competitive authoritarianism.
- The result is a strange coalition of everyone who still values democracy — leftists and democratic socialists alongside traditional conservatives, imperialists, and national security hawks, all opposed to Trumpism, however uneasily.
- Introducing tonight’s guest: Steven Cash, Executive Director of The Steady State, a group of 400-plus former senior national security professionals. Former CIA officer, senior advisor to the DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence, chief counsel to the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
00:02:48 Support the Show
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00:04:09 Steven Cash’s Origin Story: From NYC Prosecutor to the CIA
- Scott welcomes Cash, noting the surreal nature of hosting a former CIA officer on a leftist Indiana politics podcast — and Cash immediately embraces the moment.
- Cash started as a prosecutor in the New York County District Attorney’s office — the real-life version of Law & Order, minus the glamour — before joining the CIA in 1994, first as a lawyer.
- He was genuinely conflicted going in: the CIA wasn’t an organization his New York City family and friends viewed positively. He told his wife the night before he might have to resign.
- Instead, he fell in love with the institution — describing it as fundamentally as an organization built on observing the world and reporting accurately, in secret, to the people who depend on it: the president, Congress, and senior policymakers. Telling truth to power.
00:09:04 The Case Officer’s Speech: “They Are Not Your Colleagues”
- During his first week of training, an older case officer addressed the new class and pointed out that in an auditorium in Moscow, an equivalent class of new recruits was joining Russia’s SVR (the KGB’s successor) — same training, same tradecraft, different language.
- His point: those recruits are not your colleagues. The new CIA class had just sworn an oath to the Constitution; the SVR recruits swear no such oath, and their job isn’t protecting their country — it’s protecting the autocrat.
- Cash says that distinction held true throughout his career and shaped how he thinks about the current moment.
00:10:20 The Intelligence Community Doesn’t Talk Politics — Until They Had To
- Cash notes that inside the agency, political affiliation is essentially invisible — colleagues don’t discuss it, much like avoiding religion and politics at a dinner party.
- The Steady State formed in 2016 in response to the first Trump administration, bringing together former intelligence and State Department colleagues who had worked on Balkans issues and liked each other — only then did members learn who was a Republican and who was a Democrat, and it surprised people on both sides.
- The founding conviction: intelligence professionals shouldn’t normally get involved in domestic politics, but this was assessed as an existential threat that warranted an exception.
00:11:41 From Endorsing Biden to Returning to DHS Under Ken Wainstein
- The Steady State endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, including Republican members within the group, on the shared existential-threat rationale.
- Cash returned to government under Biden as senior advisor to Ken Wainstein, the DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence — previously George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Advisor. Cash respected him as a patriot even while disagreeing with him on policy.
- Cash’s title: Executive Director of the Intelligence Enterprise Program Office, coordinating intelligence functions across ICE, CBP, INA, Coast Guard, and TSA.
00:13:11 Civil Liberties Is Tradecraft — and Walking Out the Door on January 20th
- Cash’s team used the phrase “civil liberties is tradecraft” — treating rights protection as a core professional skill, not an afterthought, especially for domestically focused intelligence work.
- The day after the 2024 election, Cash told his boss he’d stay through January 20th and then leave — because everything the intelligence community had feared about a second Trump term, including a candidate who ran explicitly on using intelligence agencies against his enemies, was coming true.
00:15:37 The Russia Question: Manchurian Candidate or Useful Idiot?
- Scott raises the Russia angle to Trump’s rise, noting skepticism on the left about overstating it into a literal “Manchurian candidate” narrative versus the simpler read that Russia benefits from an inept, chaotic U.S. president regardless of formal control.
- Cash grounds his answer in the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report — signed by Marco Rubio among others — which concluded with near-unanimity that Russia sought to interfere in the election through multiple channels.
- Cash’s honest caveat: he’s not privy to current classified intelligence and won’t overstate his certainty, but from general knowledge of Russian active-measures tradecraft, the pattern is familiar.
00:16:49 The Senate Intelligence Committee Report and the Hunter Biden Laptop Letter
- Cash connects Russian influence operations to the effort to “dirty up” Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election — including, potentially, elements of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which carries what Cash calls hallmarks of Russian influence.
- He notes he didn’t sign the public letter questioning the laptop story’s provenance, not out of disagreement but because it wasn’t his area of expertise — though he respects many who did.
- What’s genuinely novel and alarming to Cash isn’t that a foreign adversary would attempt this kind of operation — that’s expected — it’s that an American president would seem to embrace rather than resist it.
00:19:16 Assessing Trump: Almost Nothing Putin Could Want That He’s Not Doing
- Cash resists the movie-style “unmasked spy” framing — real senior figures are complex, not simple assets, and he quotes Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” to make the point.
- His actual assessment, offered carefully: there is almost nothing Putin could want Trump to do that Trump isn’t doing. Whether that’s coincidence, alignment of interest, or something else, Cash says is genuinely hard to know.
- The Steady State has produced a leadership analysis-style profile of Trump; Cash describes him as mercurial, temperamental, and difficult to categorize as either brilliant or simply ignorant.
00:20:03 The Strait of Hormuz, Arrogance, and a President Uninterested in Truth
- Cash cites a recent hearing exchange in which the president seemed not to know the Strait of Hormuz is a narrow body of water off Iran’s coast — material any ninth-grade geography student would know.
- Scott’s read: being “born on third base” means never having to do the homework. Cash agrees, and connects it to a deeper problem: the intelligence community exists to speak truth to power, but this particular power isn’t interested in truth — it’s interested in people telling him he’s right.
00:22:39 State-Sanctioned Corruption: Hunter Biden vs. the Trump Family Business
- Scott contrasts the outsized political controversy around Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board seat — access-driven nepotism, but not remotely unusual by historical standards — with the current scale of Trump family profiteering off government contracts and insider information, absorbed into the daily news cycle without proportionate scrutiny.
- Cash confirms it’s happening daily, enabled by what amounts to blanket immunity from criminal law extended to Trump’s allies, friends, and family — a pattern he recognizes directly from watching dictators and autocrats abroad, including Putin, Orban, and Slobodan Milosevic, going back to Italy and Germany in the 1930s.
- The common thread: willful ignorance of facts becomes viable once you’re not trying to build democratic consensus, and rampant state-sanctioned corruption is a hallmark of autocracy, not incidental to it.
00:24:44 Money in Politics as a Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition
- Scott argues Trump isn’t an aberration but a symptom of money’s corrosive influence on American democracy over recent decades. Cash agrees in part but pushes back on the framing.
- His view: reduced legal and regulatory guardrails around money in politics were perhaps a necessary condition for Trump’s rise, but not sufficient on their own. Trump himself, and the current Republican Party, are fundamentally different from anything in the last 150 years of American political history — this isn’t old-school Tammany Hall corruption.
- Cash finds some optimism in this: a “perfect storm” of a uniquely corrupt individual finding uniquely available resources and a uniquely permissive cultural moment is a genuine historical anomaly, not an inevitable endpoint.
00:26:19 Professional Wrestling Politics and the First Unpatriotic President
- Cash describes a broader cultural shift toward treating politics like professional wrestling — cheating as part of the show, nothing really believed, nothing really true.
- He argues Trump is a true anomaly in one specific respect: he may be the first president who isn’t, whatever his other faults, actually a patriot. Cash’s evidence: Trump’s genuine-seeming question at the Normandy American cemetery — “what was in it for them” — asked, Cash believes, in real confusion rather than rhetorical cynicism.
- Cash extends the logic to the interview itself: Trump would likely assume Cash is being paid to appear, because the idea of doing something out of belief in country is, to him, incomprehensible.
00:28:36 Defining Competitive Authoritarianism
- The term originated in academia, not with The Steady State. It describes the 20th-into-21st-century evolution of autocracy away from crude coups and toward something more sophisticated.
- In complex modern societies, you can’t simply seize total control the old-fashioned way — you have to keep institutions running: legislatures, markets, nominal free speech, a nominal media. Competitive authoritarianism keeps the outward form of liberal democracy while controlling its substance from within.
- Cash’s analogy: like an old sci-fi film where an alien inhabits a human body without destroying it — the institution looks the same from outside, but something else is now running it.
00:31:01 Media Capture, Voter Suppression, and the Anti-Democratic Elements Already Built In
- Scott lists the mechanisms: loyalist takeovers of CBS, TikTok, and (soon) CNN; lawsuits and threats against ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, and George Stephanopoulos; gerrymandering; the SAVE Act and voter ID laws (which Scott notes Indiana pioneered); the Electoral College and disproportionate Senate representation.
- The overall effect resembles professional wrestling: elections appear to happen, the press appears to hold power accountable, but the outcomes aren’t level even when not fully predetermined.
- Cash agrees with the broad pattern but complicates it — the Great Compromise on Senate representation, for instance, has a legitimate pro-democratic rationale (preventing large states from dominating everything), and gerrymandering reform is genuinely difficult to design well. The difference with Trump: he isn’t interested in debating how to improve these systems — he wants the debate itself shut down.
00:34:35 Indicators and Warnings: How Every Dictator Follows the Same Playbook
- Cash introduces “indicators and warnings” (I&W), a Cold War intelligence framework for detecting incoming attacks, which The Steady State has repurposed to track authoritarian consolidation across media, academia, elections, the legislature, and security services.
- Every dictator, historically, goes after the same buckets — and the newer, subtler versions don’t do it crudely. They buy media outlets, have allies buy them, or sue them into submission.
- Cash traces the pattern back to the American Revolution itself: the Stamp Act’s real function, beyond raising revenue, was suppressing the printing and circulation of dissenting ideas. The Steady State’s current assessment across nearly all these indicators: blinking red.
00:36:55, Purges, and Why Dictators No Longer Need Lists
- Scott raises a concern about AI surveillance of dissenting speech. Cash’s response reframes the danger: historically, dictators needed literal lists of targets. AI eliminates that requirement — a system can now generate an equivalent list on demand, in real time, from unstructured public data.
- What’s changed isn’t just capability but intent: whether the system cares about precision. Cash illustrates with a deliberately absurd example of AI compiling lists of podcast hosts and their guests to make the point that the technology itself is neutral — the danger is a government willing to use it carelessly.
00:38:02 DOGE, False Positives, and Not Caring If You Get It Wrong
- Scott brings up DOGE’s early-2025 practice of using AI keyword searches to eliminate government programs — famously cutting things flagged by the word “trans” in scientific contexts like transgenic mice research, mistaking it for something else entirely.
- Cash pushes back on the idea that AI’s sloppiness offers any real protection: the danger isn’t that AI generates false positives, it’s that this administration doesn’t care about false positives. If you don’t care whether you get the wrong person, avoiding false positives becomes trivially easy to ignore.
- He contrasts this directly with his own DHS experience, where building systems with an acceptably low false-positive rate was expensive and painstaking specifically because people cared about not violating civil liberties by mistake.
00:39:07 Why the Government Used to Care About Getting It Right
- Cash describes the old process: contracting agencies like Booz Allen to merge disparate legacy databases (some running on archaic programming languages) cost enormous sums specifically because of security clearance requirements, human sign-off requirements, and false-positive rate targets under 1%.
- What made this expensive was that people at every level — from contractors to senior DHS officials under Wainstein — genuinely bought into balancing civil liberties against security, and were praised and promoted for making that argument, not fired for raising it.
- That culture, Cash says, is gone. In his entire government career, he never worried that objecting to an operation on values grounds would get him told to get out. That’s exactly what’s happening now — dissent isn’t just unwelcome, it’s disqualifying.
00:42:10 An Order of Magnitude Different: ICE Killings and the Shift From Debate to Silence
- Scott raises recent ICE actions that killed people through mistaken identity, connecting it directly to the false-positive indifference Cash just described.
- Scott frames the current moment as the logical extension of a decades-long trend, but Cash insists it’s not merely an order-of-magnitude shift — it’s an inversion. What used to be genuine, praised, career-advancing internal debate about balancing civil liberties and security has been replaced entirely.
- The through-line: agencies that once spent months arguing over how to protect both civil liberties and security now operate with no internal resistance at all — the people who would have raised objections are gone.
00:45:56 America’s Own History of Covert Action Abroad — Iran, Guatemala, Chile
- Scott asks the uncomfortable question directly: the U.S. has fostered coups and overthrown elected governments abroad — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and others. Did America have this coming? Is this the imperial boomerang finally landing at home?
- Cash separates the question into three distinct threads: should covert action be legal at all (a statutory question voters and Congress can revisit); does it actually work, or is it simply counterproductive; and is it morally wrong, regardless of legality or efficacy.
- His key point: unlike today, those internal debates historically took place — in Congress via mandatory covert action briefings, in the National Security Council, in the Oval Office. People argued hard about whether operations were wise or right. What worries him now is that he doesn’t believe those conversations are still happening.
00:50:07 The Purge Question: Are There Still Conscientious People Inside?
- Scott asks directly whether conscientious professionals remain inside the national security apparatus, or whether they’ve all been purged.
- Cash’s answer is mixed: many have been fired, purged, or reassigned; others remain and keep their heads down; some have resigned voluntarily. He’s careful to note the very real personal stakes — mortgages, health insurance, spouses who need jobs — that make walking out dramatically, as people do in movies, much harder in real life.
- Compounding the fear: senior former officials who have spoken out loudly against Trump are now facing indictments or the threat of them. Cash says this is a serious deterrent, and he still believes some people inside are thinking hard about these questions, but doesn’t envy their position.
00:52:27 Hungary as a Cautionary Tale — and a Roadmap Out
- Scott raises Hungary under Orban as the textbook example of competitive authoritarianism, and asks whether there’s still a path out given how far along the U.S. may already be.
- Cash insists it’s difficult but doable — citing his own continued work at The Steady State as evidence he believes it, rather than simply retiring in his 60s. For him and his colleagues, this is the most consequential work of their careers.
- He notes The Steady State operates with full transparency, publishing most membership publicly on its website — a contrast, he jokes, with Scott’s own well-practiced sign-off routine, which Cash says he still needs to work on.
00:53:55 Get Smart: The First Step Toward Resistance
- Cash’s first concrete recommendation: get smart. Americans urgently need to understand how their own government actually functions — reading news, asking questions, learning what obscure but critical agencies like NOAA and the National Weather Service actually do (explaining, he notes, why weather forecasts have gotten less reliable).
00:54:40 Organize, Organize, Organize — and Vote, Vote, Vote
- Second recommendation: organize, across demographics, religion, age, and policy differences — precisely the kind of strange bedfellows coalition Scott opened the show describing. Every successful historical resistance to rising or entrenched autocracy abroad has involved broad-based organizing across normally opposed groups.
- Third: vote, and get other people to vote. The country remains, for now, a democracy — even as it’s sliding quickly toward something else.
00:56:39 Real Risk Now: Sharing the Burden With Those Who Have the Most to Lose
- Cash’s fourth and most sobering point: what’s different now is that civic participation carries real, non-hypothetical risk in a way it didn’t for most of his adult life. He recalls being politically active in the McGovern campaign with zero fear of consequences — a privilege he explicitly notes did not extend to Black, Hispanic, gay, or (for much of our history) female Americans.
- He recounts being asked by a young woman in a hijab, visibly frightened, what she should do — and telling her that her fear was legitimate and her risk tolerance was hers alone to set. But his message to the rest of the room, without her visible markers of risk, was that everyone needs to share that risk now.
- Scott connects this directly to the show’s recurring theme: people with privilege have an obligation to put themselves on the line now, the way marginalized communities have always been forced to throughout American history.
00:58:39 The Election This Fall: What’s Coming and How to Push Back
- Scott asks what warning signs to expect this fall, given the pattern of red flags that preceded 2020’s post-election actions. Cash says The Steady State’s will have a forthcoming detailed rebuttal of a recent Trump speech, sketching the likely trajectory: continued efforts to delegitimize the very idea of elections, potential deployment of troops or ICE (which Cash now refers to as paramilitaries) to intimidate voters, refusal to certify results at the state or even congressional level, and use of emergency powers as a pretext to disrupt or cancel voting.
- His concrete advice: push back immediately and visibly when this rhetoric starts (he was heartened that even Fox News didn’t take Trump’s recent claims at face value); build relationships now with local police and election officials, framing the ask around protecting community members rather than partisan politics; volunteer as poll watchers; and be loud and specific about calling out disinformation as it happens.
- He closes with historical precedent for hope: both Orban-style entrenchment (in some contexts) and Milosevic’s Serbia were eventually swept out by organized popular resistance. Cash argues Americans have real advantages over those movements — material security that citizens in Hungary and Serbia often lacked.
01:03:14 Closing: Where to Find The Steady State
- Website: thesteadystate.org — daily essays and analytic products, with links to all social media from the site. (Cash notes to search carefully — there’s an unrelated economics “Steady State” movement with similar branding.)
- The Steady State does public speaking engagements; Cash recently spoke to an Indivisible chapter in Indiana and welcomes further invitations, virtual or in-person.
- His parting summary: get smart, start organizing, find some strange bedfellows, and get ready to vote.
- HoosLeft This Week guests Sunday: Muncie-area activist and organizer Chelsea McDonnel and Medicare for All Indiana’s Dr. Rob Stone.
