Coming Thursday October 16 The Steady
This Thursday, The Steady State will release Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline— written by former U.S. intelligence and national-security professionals, applying the same analytic tradecraft used to assess threats abroad. It was written by private citizens, and with no input from any government entities, political parties or candidates. The findings are stark: the warning signs of democratic decline are now visible here at home.
Coming Thursday: The Steady State Assessment of U.S. Democracy
This Thursday at 1:00 PM, The Steady State will release Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline — a first-of-its-kind analytic report written by former intelligence and national security professionals.
For decades, our members, as intelligence analysts applied rigorous U.S. intelligence community tradecraft to assess threats abroad. No longer in Government, now we’ve turned that same discipline inward — to evaluate the condition of democracy here at home.
Our findings are sobering.
Drawing on open-source evidence, the assessment identifies clear indicators of accelerating democratic backsliding — consolidation of executive power, weakening of institutional checks, politicization of justice and intelligence, and deliberate erosion of civil-service neutrality. The trend lines point toward what analysts call competitive authoritarianism — a system where elections and courts still exist, but are increasingly manipulated to entrench power.
This document was written by members of The Steady State — former officers of the CIA, NSA, DIA, State Department, and other national-security agencies — using the same structured analytic standards (e.g., confidence levels, key judgments, and scope notes) that guide official intelligence assessments. It is not a partisan argument; it is an analytic warning.
We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home.
An online “Quick Hit” press briefing will be held Thursday at 1:00 PM ET.
Embargoed copies will be distributed to press and congressional staff on Wednesday.
Stay tuned.