The wake of the Presidential election has stirred an array of reactions—grief, denial, outrage, bewilderment—among the liberals and the progressives who supported Hillary Clinton. Her loss, scarcely predicted in the polls, and therefore all the more shocking to the people who voted for her (and who outnumber her opponent’s supporters by more than a million and counting), has become a case study in political trauma. Donald Trump’s victory inspired another, less noted reaction that may prove more politically significant than the current wave of demoralization: defiance.

On the day after the election, Kevin de León, the pro-tempore president of the California Senate, and Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the California Assembly, released a joint statement whose opening sentence—“Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land”—perfectly summarized the disorientation that millions of Americans were experiencing. More important, the statement pointed out that Trump’s bigotry and misogyny were at odds with California’s values of inclusiveness and tolerance, and, the authors vowed, “we will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.”

Three days later, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, after initially flirting with the idea that Trump could be a “bonus” for the state, posted a statement on Facebook, arguing that New Yorkers “have fundamentally different philosophies than what Donald Trump laid out in his campaign.” Cuomo was tacitly accusing the President-elect—who is a New Yorker—of a kind of betrayal. He continued:

Whether you are gay or straight, Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, black or white or brown, we respect all people in the state of New York. It’s the very core of what we believe and who we are. But it’s not just what we say, we passed laws that reflect it, and we will continue to do so, no matter what happens nationally. We won’t allow a federal government that attacks immigrants to do so in our state.

That line of thought carried down the chain of command. Both Eric Garcetti and Bill de Blasio, the mayors of Los Angeles and New York, vowed to protect vulnerable populations in their cities. (Sanctuary cities across the nation, including Chicago, Seattle, and Denver, did the same, even though Trump threatened to defund them.) Charlie Beck, the chief of the L.A.P.D., added, “We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts. That is not our job, nor will I make it our job.”

These announcements cannot be dismissed as simply the whiny objections of the coastal élites. Thirty-nine million people live in California—twelve per cent of the population of the United States. The state is home to the economic and cultural axes of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Last year, its economy became the sixth largest in the world, a spot formerly held by France. Clinton beat Trump by twenty-eight points in California, and by twenty-one points in New York. Now the two states have triggered an uncommon development in a year that has offered us a great number of them: liberals invoking states’ rights.

We have become accustomed to governors denouncing overreach by the federal government. Last year, more than thirty governors released statements opposing President Barack Obama’s plan to resettle Syrian refugees in their states, even though federal authority clearly allowed him to do so. In 2012, Republican opponents of the Affordable Care Act based their challenge, at the Supreme Court, on the ground that it violated states’ rights. Later that year, shortly after Obama was reëlected, more than a hundred thousand Texans signed a petition requesting that the White House respond to their demand for secession. (This presented a paradox in that the petitioners were recognizing federal authority in an attempt to claim that the federal government did not have authority over them.) It would seem ironic that two of the largest and most consistently Democratic states have now presented states’-rights arguments in their cause, were it not for history.

States’ rights have a complicated genealogy, which ties the birth of the Confederacy to Southern resistance to civil rights. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan invoked the phrase in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil-rights workers had been murdered, in 1964—he was offering a kind of absolution, if not for racial violence then for the principle that had been used to justify it. Today, the phrase is often shorthand for opposition to “big government,” a term that carries racial implications of its own. Yet the argument for states’ rights began in the early years of the republic, in an effort to confront exactly the type of threat to non-citizens that the incoming Administration poses.

In 1798, the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts increased the residency requirement from five years to fourteen before immigrants could vote, and authorized the executive branch to summarily deport immigrants who were deemed dangerous or who had come from hostile nations. In response, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, whose Democratic-Republican Party was favored by immigrants, wrote the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, which held that individual states had the right to nullify unconstitutional laws within their borders. They further stipulated that states had the right to “interpose” themselves against the authority of the federal government. George Washington was among those who saw the resolutions as a cure that was worse than the illness of federal overreach. But the notion of states’ rights survived.

Trump’s hostility toward immigration has taken various iterations, but the common theme is to rid the country of foreign residents deemed dangerous and to prohibit the entry of people from hostile nations. It would appear that, two hundred and eighteen years later, the principles of the Alien and Sedition Acts have sprung, with surprising vigor, from their resting place in history. The political leaders in New York and California have not yet proposed nullifying federal authority on immigration—they are only resisting it, in the service of the higher principle of democracy and inclusion. That alone can’t forestall the damage that a Trump Administration might do on the issue of immigration. But, for the millions of Americans, immigrants and non-immigrants alike, who also woke up last week feeling like strangers in a foreign land, it is as good a starting place as any. ♦