California is closer than it has ever been to achieving part of its dream, allowing people of all races and nationalities to seek a golden future. But older Californians, liberal and conservative alike, are too indifferent to the needs of the next generation, too settled in their ways to accommodate them. The Democrats who run the state fail all but its most fortunate residents in the realms of housing, education, and economic opportunity. And no opposition is correcting for the worst shortcomings of the Democrats, because despite the efforts of some tolerant and farsighted GOP legislators, like Fong, much of the California GOP flunks the inclusion-threshold test voters now demand, most recently by tying its fortunes to Trumpism even as the state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected it.

The NIMBY impulse is not new. Carey McWilliams observed in 1949 that although Californians were fascinated by their state’s phenomenal growth, they were simultaneously “disturbed and even repelled” by it. “They want the state to grow, and yet they don’t want it to grow,” he explained. “They like the idea of growth and expansion, but withdraw from the practical implications.” But when he wrote those words, amid a severe housing shortage, policy makers in both parties still encouraged countless small developers to build houses and apartments as rapidly as possible.

Today matters are much worse. The most powerful factions of residents do not want their state to grow and do not accept the fact that it surely will. For 40 years, they haven’t just failed to adequately plan for the housing needs of California’s current population; upper-income residents in San Diego and the Bay Area as surely as those in Los Angeles have deliberately fought to restrict the supply of housing. Even now, when housing costs are the primary reason that a majority of registered voters say they’ve considered moving, and when politicians in both parties pay lip service to the problem, there is insufficient political will to attempt a plausible solution. And the forces paralyzing the state are all the more entrenched because some of them believe themselves to be protecting the California Dream.