For the past 20 years, the Republican Party has perversely rewritten former Supreme Court Louis Brandeis’s notion that states could be “laboratories of democracy.” Where Brandeis imagined state governments pushing liberal and progressive ideas beyond the national consensus, drawing the nation forward, Republicans have worked to preserve a dwindling white majority through gerrymandering and have used state governments not merely to slow down liberalism, but to turn it to dust and ash in the broad center of the country. In the so-called red states, liberalism is now often relegated to a kind of folklore-ish local practice in college towns and mid-sized cities, while formal, statewide policy is strictly and stridently conservative.

Red states, in other words, are laboratories of anti-democracy—as many have been, in a way, since the days of slaveholding and Jim Crow. With the election of Donald Trump, it’s safe to say that most people’s lives will get worse in these states, and that the forces of intolerance and bigotry will grow stronger and even less cautious. But what about blue states?

Those of us who care about an equitable civil society, who believe in a just world, and who live in a proverbial blue state have an obligation to work locally to turn them into laboratories of something else: that diminished thing called hope. Optimism is retreating nationally and internationally. The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual respect. We need new symbols desperately. Blue states—especially those with democratic supermajorities and friendly neighbors, like Massachusetts and Rhode Island, California and Oregon—can be those symbols. And they can turn that symbolism into meaningful practice and policy.

Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo is showing the way. Speaking last month at a prayer vigil for gun-violence victims, she said, “Tonight’s an opportunity to remember that hate and intolerance and violence have never been a part of what makes the state strong.” Raimondo insisted that Trump’s victory would not “erode our core beliefs,” but rather “provide a greater sense of urgency for the work that I do and for the values that we hold dear, to protect them even more because we realize we need to.”

On the other coast, California Governor Jerry Brown promised to turn climate science into a statewide enterprise if the federal government mothballs such research. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” Brown said, speaking to a crowd of scientists last month in San Francisco, “California will launch its own damn satellite.” Like his east coast analogue, Brown speaks with even greater resolve and determination now that his state is the vanguard of the political opposition.