Believe it or not, lots of Americans don’t wish they lived in California. You wouldn’t rather pay $3,000 a month for a squash-box apartment nor dodge human excrement on the sidewalk. But it doesn’t matter: The Golden State – or, rather, its vast armies of bureaucrats – controls your lives even in your absence. And this outwardly sunny dystopia may get worse.

As if Hollywood and Silicon Valley don’t dictate enough of what you see, hear and do, consider how the fringe sensibilities of California regulators also determine what you drive. The growing dispute over air-pollution standards between the Trump administration, and a handful of automakers plus the State of California, underscores the fact that California remains in the driver's seat for determining how all Americans must live in response to its environmental alarmism.

Four automotive manufacturers recently decided to bow to California’s unyielding demands for technologically unattainable higher thresholds for fuel economy and emissions even though the Trump administration has lowered federal expectations. In what at first appears to be either a case of corporate Stockholm syndrome or an attempt to claim the environmental moral high ground, the companies—Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen—are rejecting the lowered federal threshold federal standard in favor of the much more stringent California standards.

It is dangerous to encourage the Californians in this way, because their green police will no doubt continue to grab as much power as they can with regulations not just governing vehicles but also the options available to all American consumers in so many other areas of life. Whether it’s requiring consumer warnings that coffee is carcinogenic (it’s not), restricting water usage to draconian levels, or mandating the use of solar panels in residential construction, the environmental overreach being experienced by Californians today will likely be on its way to your state tomorrow.

Indeed, California long ago appointed itself as the nation’s environmental czar, and it is the next generation of accelerated regulations that the Trump administration is resisting California’s attempt to set the auto-emissions and fuel economy targets for not just one state, but the other 49 states as well. California frames its arguments as one of states’ rights, but in reality, the motive is to protect its de facto control over the entire U.S. auto market that is at stake. Because of its unique geography and the inevitable air-pollution problem in southern California, in 1970 the state was granted a waiver from the federal Clean Air Act, allowing it to impose its own, singularly strict regulations on any auto sold in the state. Given California's huge population and their purchasing power—and the complexities of designing, testing and manufacturing extra power trains for automobiles—California’s standards became the understood benchmark for cars made for the entire country. And automakers simply passed these costs on to the consumer. For 40 years, California’s hegemony didn’t pose an unbearable strain on the industry. But when President Obama got into office, it dramatically, and unilaterally, ramped up federal emissions and fuel-economy standards for future automobiles to technologically infeasible levels. So California’s unique control over the issue became more problematic. And in league with the climate-change posse in the Obama administration, the loony-left bureaucrats in charge of the California Air Resources Board suddenly were in control of the future of the U.S. auto industry, with even more power to determine what consumers in the rest of the country could drive.

Why? Well, because the Obama standards called for “corporate average” fuel economy rising to 54.5 mpg by 2026, by several percent a year from already-unrealistic levels dictated for 2021. Obama administration officials understood that such an achievement was unreachable even with the industry’s huge advances in efficiency in internal-combustion engines, so they gave automakers an out: extra credit for producing and selling electric vehicles. California officials were happy to go along because their state already had by far more electric vehicle owners than anywhere else in the country, and some of the state’s other business leaders, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, were big electric vehicle backers. Manufacturers are also allowed to sell and trade their extra credit points, representing a major revenue stream for Tesla.

So while American car buyers clearly have indicated with their wallets that they overwhelmingly continue to favor gasoline-powered vehicles, and just as clearly have disdained all-electric vehicles that remain more expensive despite massive federal tax incentives, California’s demand for higher future targets actually represents a confiscation of consumers’ rights to make those decisions.

Automakers have been canning the thought of continuing to manufacture gas-powered sedans. The manufacturers are pinioned between consumer demand for larger, higher-horsepower sports cars, spacious SUVs and pickup trucks, and regulators who demand that they produce all-electric models at a frenetic pace. Despite the government’s attempt to define the vehicles that Americans want to buy, the demand for larger combustion-engine vehicles has never been stronger. As the pressures mount on consumers to buy electric vehicles, blame California.

So how is it that California has the four automakers willing to say “uncle” to the more-stringent fuel-economy standards? The four did not break ranks with the other manufacturers just to buy themselves some regulatory certainty, as has been intimated; the lower federal emission and fuel economy standards proposed by President Trump would give them that.

Instead, the four renegade companies are dumping industry unity to protect their own massive investments in playing the complex regulatory game better than their competitors. It is a classic example of form becoming more important than substance. Somewhere along the way, it no longer was simply about building the best vehicles they could, and what consumers want to buy, but rather earning a score on a regulator’s scorecard.

So far, other automakers haven’t gone along with their four rivals’ unprecedented move of buckling under to the iron-fisted power of the climate-change coterie in California. But the industry’s fractured approach to regulatory compliance must get resolved. The industry must soon coalesce around either the relaxed Trump administration rules or the draconian California for all standard.

Right on cue, attorneys general in 22 other states already have followed the Pied Piper’s tune and also have sued to stop the Trump administration from revoking the authority of California to set emissions standards for cars and trucks sold in their states as well.

They might as well all just break out a tune that the rock group The Dead Kennedys released in 1978, clearly seeing even then the dark impulses of California’s repressive apparatus that is now trying to maintain its grip on the rest of America, too.

“I will be Fuhrer one day,” the lyrics say in the voice of then-California Gov. Jerry Brown. “I will command all of you. Your kids will meditate in school. Your kids will meditate in school. California Uber Alles.”

Robert Norton is general counsel of Hillsdale College and a former top-level legal executive of automakers and major automotive suppliers.