{"id":475529,"date":"2026-09-25T17:40:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T17:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/475529\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T17:40:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T17:40:14","slug":"opinion-the-california-dream-has-always-warned-of-its-own-demise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/475529\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: The California dream has always warned of its own demise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"San<\/a>Downtown San Francisco from the Golden Gate Bridge. (Photo courtesy of the city)<\/p>\n

Is the California Dream dead?<\/p>\n

Year after year, journalists<\/a> and commentators<\/a> announce the dream\u2019s failure or imminent collapse. And yet, we cannot seem to let it go. Now, as the 175th year of statehood comes to a close, we should consider the dream\u2019s curious hold on us, how it helps us recognize one version of the Golden State\u2019s history, and what it could mean for our future. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Opinion<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2018, Gavin Newsom\u2019s campaign pledged to bring the dream back from the dead (\u201cWe can and must reanimate the California Dream\u201d); this year, gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra barnstorms under the banner, \u201cFighting for the California Dream.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

For many the vision still lives: A poll in 2021<\/a> showed most Californians believe the dream has relevance for them, with Asian Americans, Black people, and Latinos actually expressing greater faith in it than white respondents. A 2026 poll<\/a> suggests nearly half of Californians still believe in it.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no firm definition of the California Dream. For most, it evokes a shared, quasi-national aspiration that supposedly energized the state\u2019s ascent from humble frontier beginnings to global bellwether. The dream encapsulates a version of the state\u2019s history that goes something like this: Most residents, from 1850 onward, have believed in California\u2019s future and have invested their lives, labor, and money in pursuit of its promises of expansive leisure and extraordinary beauty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But is that, in fact, the case?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read thousands of letters and diaries from 19th-century California and never come across any mention of the California Dream in them. Other historians find it similarly elusive. Gold Rush writers warned against \u201cthe golden dream,\u201d a delusion that one was about to become rich. A digital search for the term \u201cCalifornia Dream\u201d in the 40 million books<\/a> scanned by Google suggests it did not appear in any of those published in the 1850s<\/a>, or for decades after.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As best I can determine, it wasn\u2019t until 1966 that the California Dream made its appearance, buried in the automotive section of the New York Times in an article about Los Angeles traffic. \u201cHere in the midst of the California dream gone wild, freeways proliferate almost as fast as contractors can pour cement,\u201d observed journalist Bill Becker. \u201cBut so do the frustrations.\u201d No matter how fast freeways went up, he wrote, cars multiplied faster and traffic (and smog) grew worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The following year, in 1967, Joan Didion published her famous article, \u201cCalifornia Dreaming,\u201d in which she skewered a California think tank for casual sexism and celebrity worship that precluded them from, well, thinking. Neither Becker nor Didion felt compelled to explain what they meant by the California Dream. Both seemed to believe their audiences already knew. And neither thought that the prospects for the dream were very good.<\/p>\n

The most likely explanation for why \u201cCalifornia Dream\u201d made its first appearance in the middle of the 1960s is obvious: The Mamas & The Papas\u2019 hit single, \u201cCalifornia Dreamin\u2019,\u201d which climbed the charts in the early months of 1966. The song presents California as a romantic haven for sincere people longing to escape the corrupt East. <\/p>\n

If the lush harmonies, folk rhythms, and country-rock beat that became known as \u201cthe California sound\u201d were new, the song was a re-working of the old myth of the Far West as paradisiacal retreat. To be in California, according to the band (who had recently moved from New York City to the Hollywood Hills), was to be safe, war, and free of stifling institutions, ceremonies, hierarchies and social ties.<\/p>\n

The song appealed to millions of young postwar Baby Boomers, many of them fans of Southern California folk-rock and pop artists, most famously Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. And, more broadly, the song evoked a widespread fascination with California. The suburban comforts of Los Angeles, combined with what we might call a countercultural instrumentation (including a 12-string guitar plucked in imitation of a sitar and a breathy alto flute) lent the place a foreign, exotic tinge.<\/p>\n

\u201cCalifornia Dream\u201d became shorthand in part for a combination of attractions that was drawing millions of new residents. Readers perhaps will be surprised to learn that, despite the Gold Rush, California\u2019s growth was anemic in the 19th century. By 1900, the state ranked only 21st in population, with 1.5 million people (making it around the same size as Kansas). But growth exploded in the decades following, and especially after World War II. 1940s California added 3.6 million new residents, and in the 1950s over 5 million more arrived. By 1960, 16 million people lived in California. By 1962, California surpassed New York to become the most populous state in the Union.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But for all the pop song\u2019s good vibes, most commentators echoed Becker and Didion in discounting the dream, which seemed to fade amid upheaval outside the recording studio. \u201cCalifornia Dreamin\u2019\u201d was recorded in Los Angeles the same year that the Watts Rebellion shook the city and thousands of armed National Guard members descended on South Los Angeles. Across the nation, large numbers of Americans were recoiling from anti-Civil Rights violence and beginning to question the Vietnam War. A No. 1 pop song in 1965 had been \u201cEve of Destruction,\u201d with Barry McGuire\u2019s gravelly voice intoning about war, racial strife, and the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite our era\u2019s pervasive nostalgia for those years, California\u2019s heady expansion provoked deep anxieties at the time \u2014 about suburban sprawl, air pollution and supposedly imminent overpopulation. In 1962, an organization called California Tomorrow warned of the costs of growth in a pamphlet called \u201cCalifornia: Going, Going . . . .\u201d In 1965, the group appointed a bipartisan advisory board (chaired by Caspar Weinberger, future defense secretary for Ronald Reagan) to oversee a new journal, Cry California, which explored ways of \u201cmaintaining a beautiful and productive California.\u201d Cry California ran until 1982. In 1991, Time magazine published a special issue called \u201cCalifornia: The Endangered Dream.\u201d<\/a> In years following, a long string of authors blamed California\u2019s growth for unraveling its good fortunes \u2014 killing or mortally wounding the dream.<\/p>\n

But then, about two decades ago, as the population hit 35 million people, growth and the conversation about it took an abrupt turn. By 2005, California\u2019s annual population growth had fallen to 1% or less. In 2019, the state\u2019s growth slowed to .35%, the slowest since 1900; in 2020, for the first time, the state lost population, as it did again in 2025. Popular anxiety today swirls around California\u2019s lack of growth: The dream is now endangered because of stagnation or decline. Fewer people move here, it is said, because inequality is too great.<\/a> Or the price of housing is too high and drought is too severe<\/a>. Or regulations are too onerous.<\/a> Today, a tumbling birth rate<\/a> and a col<\/a>l<\/a>apsing rate of immigration<\/a> have caused U.S. growth to stall, too. Once again, as California goes so goes the nation.<\/p>\n

In truth, the dream was endangered from its birth. Invoking it has always been a means to warn of its demise. But behind all these discussions about the California Dream has been a profound questioning of what makes the American good life and how widely and equally it can be shared \u2014 a suitable set of queries, I think, for a 175th birthday.<\/p>\n

Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Distinguished Professor of U.S. Western History at UC Davis, where he publishes on the California Dream<\/a> and other subjects.<\/a> He wrote this essay for Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>, an\u00a0ASU Media Enterprise<\/a>\u00a0publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Downtown San Francisco from the Golden Gate Bridge. (Photo courtesy of the city) Is the California Dream dead?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,79526,9,8,146701],"class_list":["post-475529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-dream","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-zocalo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}