Inside the ancient town hall of Siena, Italy, the walls hold a series of magnificent 14th-century frescoes showing the effects of good government and bad. One side depicts a prosperous city-state, where justice and tolerance prevail in the Tuscan countryside. The other is ruled by a horned, fanged figure, the streets deserted and scary.

We saw our own version of this allegory with the two Americas this week — one going backward, the other stepping into tomorrow. We saw a retreat to bigotry in states dooming themselves to decline. And in other states, we saw a way for people to get around a do-nothing Congress controlled by Know-Nothing throwbacks.

First, the good. On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill that will eventually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, lifting the earnings of 2.3 million New Yorkers, and he authorized one of the strongest paid parental leave laws in the nation. On the same day, Gov. Jerry Brown of California put his signature to a $15 minimum wage plan in the most populous state. Then San Francisco became the first place in the United States to require businesses to provide paid leave for new parents.

What had seemed impossible just a few years ago is now rolling through cities and states led by forward-looking politicians. Together, these changes amount to a “revolution in the workplace,” as one exultant activist put it. But let’s not get too excited: The United States remains the only developed country in the world that does not mandate paid parental leave.

Now, the bad. Following North Carolina’s lead, another state, Mississippi, passed a law allowing people and institutions to deny services to gay people. With this measure, Mississippi, already one of the poorest states in the nation, ensures that good job providers will stay away.

Indeed, PayPal dropped plans to bring 400 jobs to North Carolina after politicians gave people a green light to discriminate. And a host of corporate leaders signed a letter on Wednesday explaining why Mississippi and North Carolina would be shunned. “Such laws are bad for employees,” the representatives of companies ranging from Whole Foods to General Electric wrote, “and bad for business.”Next door, in Alabama, the embattled Republican governor signed a bill earlier this year preventing cities from raising the minimum wage. This after Birmingham dared to dream of a day when its lowest-paid workers could make $10 an hour.

Nearly all the states with the highest percentage of minimum wage workers — full-time jobholders making $290 a week, before taxes — are in the South. These are also the same states that refuse to expand Medicaid to allow the working poor to get health care. And it’s in the same cradle of the old Confederacy where discriminatory bills are rising. Don’t blame the cities; from Birmingham to Charlotte, people are trying to open doors to higher wages and tolerance of gays, only to be rebuffed at the state level.

Essentially, this Republican-controlled block has decided that it’s better to be poor, sick and bigoted than prosperous, healthy and open-minded. And its defense is precisely that: The region is too economically distressed and socially backward to accept progress, so why change? Discrimination, as they see it, is just another term for religious freedom.

Raising the minimum wage is not a panacea, as Governor Brown noted. But he called it a moral imperative, one that will allow full-time workers at the low end to better provide for their children. In California and New York, the new laws have flexibility, either by region, or size of business, or during the phase-in period.

Good companies feel the same way. Costco just announced that it would raise entry-level wages to $13.50 an hour — at a cost to stockholders of a penny a share in the current quarter. One penny. Twitter will soon start giving full-time employees 20 weeks of paid parental leave.

Lifting wages for low-end workers and bringing the United States into the 21st century on family leave should be no-brainers. And yet, Congress refuses to move on President Obama’s call for paid parental leave for federal employees, and will not raise the minimum wage beyond the paltry $7.25 an hour.

Still, people are blowing past the obstructionists. Since Obama first called on Congress to move forward on wages, in 2013, 18 states and at least 40 cities have acted on their own. Expect to see family leave laws ripple across the land as well.

“The nation is alive from the bottom up,” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told my colleague Thomas Fuller. “For all the disproportionate focus on Washington, D.C., there’s a whole other America out there, and it should give pause to the pessimists.” Indeed, a new poll found that 44 percent of California residents approve the Legislature’s job performance — compared with a 14 percent approval rating for Congress.

Now, maybe paying the working poor a little more will be a job-killer, as Republicans assert. Maybe mandating parental leave will inhibit business start-ups. Sure. If you believe doing nothing, in the wake of 20 years of declining wages and a harder quality of life, is better than doing something, this is your home: the geography of despair.

<TIMOTHY EGAN>