If there’s one thing that U.S. civics education hammers home the most—the one thing that grade school students first learn, which is one of the preeminent things international audiences know about our system of government—it’s that it is a federal system. There is no national ID, there are individual laws and even constitutions for every state, we have entirely different criminal justice regimes from state to state and a variety of approaches to everything from environmental protection to health care. To each state their own, we say.

This self-image will likely never have felt less abstract or more acute to blue-state governors and other officials who are watching as Trump effectively goes to war with their populations, particularly via the aggressive deployment of federal law enforcement in a way that will only be turbocharged by the MAGA megabill’s showering of staggering resources on immigration enforcement, detention, surveillance, and so on. As I’ve consistently written, the immigration crackdown has a real ideological basis and practical effect, but is also an entry point for the administration to target speech and political organizing. Masked agents are shoving people into unmarked cars, and the federal government is making the explicit argument that it can arrest people for their political ideas and target the citizenship of politicians that it doesn’t like.

Seeing all this, state executives are faced with a set of questions, whether they like it or not. How much are they going to tolerate? What is their responsibility to their own state residents, and when and how does this responsibility conflict with Trump’s overreaches? If the federal government won’t uphold civil liberties and constitutional principles, is it on them instead? And how would this even work?

These are all third-rail questions—inquiries that most mainstream commentators, politicians, and researchers have been squeamish about broaching for relatively obvious reasons. The reality is that there is no Democratic governor in the country who wants to get into a head-to-head showdown with a wannabe despot who controls the military and the mechanisms of hard and soft federal power. Ultimately, governors and other state and local officials might just not get to avoid making a choice as the administration’s moves force their hand. In California, Trump has federal agents and troops literally marching through town backed by armored vehicles. Governor Gavin Newsom’s control over his own state National Guard was not something he got to test because Trump preempted him, illegally federalizing the military for domestic law enforcement and making California sue, unsuccessfully, to try to get it back after the fact.

On the right, impassioned resistance to a centralized federal government that wants to, say, impose environmental regulations or force access to abortions has been an item of faith for decades, which has made the concept of strong federalism and active local pushback a conservative-coded principle among liberals and many on the left. On another extreme, the online tankie types have long lusted for glorious revolution on the premise that an authoritarian government will be safely splintered and replaced with some utopia—a shaky understanding of history at best. Neither group is particularly beloved or taken seriously by institutional Democratic executives.

Very few people want another civil war, and no one could possibly guarantee the outcome of such a conflict. Yet there is a vast space that exists somewhere between doing nothing and getting into a shooting war with the federal government, a space that liberal governors have only warmed up to potentially stepping into over the last decade or so. The whole notion of states’ rights and showing down against federal overreach is filtered through “the paradigm example of George Wallace in Alabama standing in the schoolhouse door, or other governors in the 1950s........

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