From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, March 7th.

We'll get some thoughts on the state of the country now from the journalist, essayist, and commentator Anand Giridardis will largely get

his take on the debate taking place within the Democratic Party and more generally on the

American left right now about how to respond to the Trump administration's, you know, shock and

awe campaign of multiple highly charged actions every day, the specific policies and the larger

underlying questions of oligarchy and authoritarianism. To set this up before Anand comes on,

every time we have a Democratic member of Congress on the show lately, one of the most common

calls we get is do more than you're doing, sound more urgent, show more fight,

right? On the other hand, maybe you saw the op-ed in the New York Times that's gotten a lot of

attention by the Bill Clinton era Democratic strategist James Carville, urging the Democrats to

play possum, as he called it, because as he delicately put it, quote, the Republican Party

sucks at governing, unquote. And if Democrats lie low for a little while and don't make

themselves the issue, Americans will very quickly reject most of the Trump and Musk project.

We heard another other argument like that on all things considered this week, maybe you're listening,

from Matt Bennett, Executive Vice President for Public Affairs at Third Way, the centrist

Democratic think tank.

He did not think it was smart, for example, for Congressman Al Green to get himself thrown

out of the chamber on national television on Tuesday night by shouting responses during Trump's address to Congress,

or if they want to convince, convinceable voters of anything, for some other Democrats there to hold up protest placards or turn their backs and walk out displaying shirts that said resist.

Matt Bennett said this.

And I really don't think that those kinds of displays are what those voters are looking for.

They're looking for a party that is more reasonable in their view than Trump and the Republicans.

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