Several progressive politicians relied on these arguments, from Barney Frank’s urging the city of San Francisco to use the rhetoric of local control to resist a federal gay marriage ban to Senator Richard B. Blumenthal’s invoking states’ rights when he was the attorney general of Connecticut on issues ranging from banking regulations to banning assault weapons. In fact, you can make a credible case that the most important progressive victories in the Obama era — including health care reform and marriage equality, both originally tested in Massachusetts — emerged from the states during the Bush administration, just as Brandeis anticipated.

As Professor Gerken explained in an article for the journal Democracy in 2012, progressive federalism is a way to create a decentralized system “where national minorities constitute local majorities,” thus allowing “minorities to protect themselves rather than look to courts as their source of solace.” Progressive federalists like Professor Gerken argued during Mr. Obama’s second term that decentralization could help minorities in mostly African-American cities like Atlanta or in a state like California, where Hispanics are the largest group.

Having lost all three branches of the federal government again, progressives are now concluding that they have no alternative but to redouble their efforts at the local level. Some of these efforts will be defensive: If a Supreme Court with more than one Trump appointment overturns Roe v. Wade, the abortion issue, as Mr. Trump noted, “will go back to the states.” Progressives would then have to make the case against abortion restrictions state by state.

But some important progressive victories have already occurred in blue and red state referendums. On Nov. 8, voters in three states (California, Nevada and Washington) voted for stricter gun control. Four states (Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington) voted to increase the minimum wage. Four Trump states (Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota) passed ballot measures allowing or expanding the use of medical marijuana, while California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada voted to legalize the use of recreational marijuana.

These state marijuana legalization initiatives, however, may be challenged by the Trump Justice Department and the Supreme Court. And the tables may be turned as White House conservatives abandon their devotion to federalism to pursue a national war on drugs while progressives invoke states’ rights to defend local legalization efforts. In August 2013, the Obama Justice Department announced that while federal law continues to regulate marijuana as a controlled substance, it would conditionally waive its right to challenge Colorado and Washington State laws legalizing the drug. A Trump administration, however, might reverse this policy and enforce federal anti-marijuana laws. The battle could end up at the Supreme Court, much as it did in 2005, when the Bush administration challenged California’s medical marijuana law.

THE last time around, these challenges divided Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian conservatives on the Supreme Court, who reached opposite conclusions. In Gonzales v. Raich, the court held by a 6-3 vote that the Controlled Substances Act was a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce and therefore pre-empted California’s law legalizing medical marijuana. The sometime Hamiltonian nationalist Justice Antonin Scalia joined Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and the four liberal justices in holding that local use of marijuana might affect supply and demand in the national marijuana market. The Jeffersonian Justice Clarence Thomas joined two other states’ rights conservatives — Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — in holding that Congress was threatening the ability of states to serve as “laboratories of democracy.”