Is the California Dream dead?

Year after year, journalists and commentators announce the dream’s 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’s curious hold on us, how it helps us recognize one version of the Golden State’s history, and what it could mean for our future.  

In 2018, Gavin Newsom’s campaign pledged to bring the dream back from the dead (“We can and must reanimate the California Dream”); this year, gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra barnstorms under the banner, “Fighting for the California Dream.” For many the vision still lives: A poll in 2021 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 suggests nearly half of Californians still believe in it.

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

But is that, in fact, the case?

I’ve 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 “the golden dream,” a delusion that one was about to become rich. A digital search for the term “California Dream” in the 40 million books scanned by Google suggests it did not appear in any of those published in the 1850s, or for decades after. 

As best I can determine, it wasn’t 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. “Here in the midst of the California dream gone wild, freeways proliferate almost as fast as contractors can pour cement,” observed journalist Bill Becker. “But so do the frustrations.” No matter how fast freeways went up, he wrote, cars multiplied faster and traffic (and smog) grew worse. 

The following year, in 1967, Joan Didion published her famous article, “California Dreaming,” 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.

The most likely explanation for why “California Dream” made its first appearance in the middle of the 1960s is obvious: The Mamas & The Papas’ hit single, “California Dreamin’,” 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. If the lush harmonies, folk rhythms, and country-rock beat that became known as “the California sound” 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, warm, and free of stifling institutions, ceremonies, hierarchies, and social ties.

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.

“California Dream” 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’s 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. 

But for all the pop song’s good vibes, most commentators echoed Becker and Didion in discounting the dream, which seemed to fade amid upheaval outside the recording studio. “California Dreamin’” 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 “Eve of Destruction,” with Barry McGuire’s gravelly voice intoning about war, racial strife, and the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse. 

Despite our era’s pervasive nostalgia for those years, California’s heady expansion provoked deep anxieties at the time—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 “California: Going, Going . . . .” 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 “maintaining a beautiful and productive California.” Cry California ran until 1982. In 1991, Time magazine published a special issue called “California: The Endangered Dream.” In years following, a long string of authors blamed California’s growth for unraveling its good fortunes—killing or mortally wounding the dream.

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’s annual population growth had fallen to 1% or less. In 2019, the state’s 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’s 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. Or the price of housing is too high and drought is too severe. Or regulations are too onerous. Today, a tumbling birth rate and a collapsing rate of immigration have caused U.S. growth to stall, too. Once again, as California goes so goes the nation.

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—a suitable set of queries, I think, for a 175th birthday.

Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Distinguished Professor of U.S. Western History at UC Davis, where he publishes on the California Dream and other subjects.

This piece publishes as part of California 175 — What Connects California?, a suite of free Zócalo programs and essays, bringing together leaders and thinkers from all walks of life to envision California’s next 175 years.

Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown