“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people—you come through me.”—Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker

This remark at Governor Pritzker’s postelection press conference was the sole heartening thing I have heard since the debacle of November 5. Why?

Frederick Douglass famously asserted, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.” This maxim is usually invoked to stress the need for tenacity, as in the United Farm Workers’ “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”), or the motto of African revolutionaries in the Portuguese colonies, “A luta continua” (“the struggle continues”), or the Wobbly martyr Joe Hill’s “Don’t mourn, organize.” But Douglass’s insight goes deeper. He understood that oppressive power will concede nothing except when confronted by a countervailing power; that moral righteousness and steadfast commitment avail little unless the oppressed grasp the necessary tools. The arc of justice does not bend by itself; it is bent—or not.

Certainly, resistance to MAGA will brew, but we need to be strategic about how to make that resistance effective. Progressives cannot afford to be like the proverbial French generals, always fighting the last war. In this case, the “last war” is the mass Women’s Marches of January 2017, the largest protests in US history—until the Black Lives Matter mobilizations in 2020! But today, when Trump has targeted dissenters and is itching to use federal and paramilitary forces against his opponents, those kinds of protests cannot be our only way to resist.

The question now is how to deploy actual power to block the vicious MAGA agenda once it takes control of the federal government.

In my view, we should take up one of the most effective forms of resistance to unjust authority in US history—fighting at the level of individual states and municipalities, where governors and legislatures, mayors and city councils act to protect their own citizens. Yes, I am talking about “states’ rights.”

Here we face a problem of historical memory. Throughout the 20th century, the term “states’ rights” meant the right of a state to disfranchise, segregate, exclude from public services, and deny basic physical safety to some of its own citizens. That was the constitutional rationale underlying Jim Crow from Virginia to Texas, how Chicanos were treated in the Southwest, and Native American peoples virtually everywhere. In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout from the Democratic convention when the party finally endorsed civil rights. He convened a States’ Rights Democratic Party and swept four states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama) as the only “Democrat” on the ballot.

Eight years later, 101 Southern Members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, damning the Brown v. Board of Education decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” that would “encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people.” And Ronald Reagan sounded a loud dog-whistle on August 3, 1980, telling whites at the Neshoba County fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where the KKK had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964—that “I believe in states’ rights…. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

But there is also a powerful history of state and local resistance to injustice that we can draw on. As Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction and my The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War document, in the half-century preceding Lincoln’s election, governors, legislatures, towns, and cities in much of the North resisted the legal claims of the slaveholding states, defending the rights of their citizens against “the Slave Power”—meaning the South’s domination of national politics. As this defiance spread in the 1850s, it effectively nullified the federal government’s ability to enforce the claims of slave-owners.

There is a further implication for our own time, when Republicans controlling red states seek to abrogate the citizenship of those deemed “other,’”whether immigrants, trans persons, or anyone not white. In the antebellum era, “states’ rights” meant that when a state granted citizenship to African Americans by enfranchising them if male, authorizing them to testify against whites in court, issuing passports to them (as Massachusetts did in the 1850s), and protecting them against slave-catchers via “personal liberty” laws, that state’s governor, legislature, and courts were deliberately confronting those states that refused citizenship to Black people.

Up until 1850, the central issue was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which required states to comply with the Constitution’s specification that any “person held to Service or Labour in one State,” if escaping to another, must be returned. In the 1810s, legislators above the Mason-Dixon responded viscerally to well-organized kidnapping rings in the Chesapeake, which regularly abducted persons of color (especially children). In 1820, Pennsylvania passed the first “personal liberty” law, further strengthened by an 1826 act making it extremely difficult for a slave-owner to to reclaim his human chattels.