After George W. Bush’s second victory in 2004, when Republicans held all three branches of government, progressive scholars and public officials began to rediscover the virtues of what Heather K. Gerken of Yale Law School, the intellectual guru of the movement, calls “A New Progressive Federalism.” David J. Barron, now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, wrote an article in Dissent after Mr. Bush’s re-election referring to “the emergence of why-go-to-Canada-when-you-have-federalism discussions within lefty circles.”

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.