What if the internet stopped working for one day?Īccording to Monica Toft, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, arguments in support of these plans include the belief that the federal government no longer represents California’s economic interests that the state is so large that proper governance is only possible if applied across a smaller geographic scale or that irreconcilable differences have emerged between what California and the rest of the US stand for.How Western civilisation could collapse.For the past few years, divides both within the state, and between California and the rest of the US, have sparked at least six initiatives aimed at breaking California into smaller states or cleaving it entirely from the rest of the country. “Polarisation in Congress is at levels we have not seen in more than 100 years.”Ĭalifornia is no exception. “We have to go back historically, to something like the 1890s post-Civil War period, to find politics in the US that are anywhere near as bitterly polarised as we have now,” says Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Some scholars argue that ideological tensions have never been greater in living memory. By contrast, in 1994 those figures were just 64% and 70%, respectively. According to the Pew Research Center, median Republicans are more conservative than 97% of Democrats, while median Democrats are more liberal than 95% of Republicans. Ironically, the Bear Flag itself proved far more enduring than the republic it represented: it became the official state flag when California joined the union in 1850.Americans have grown increasingly polarised in recent years. Since the ultimate goal of the Bear Flaggers was to make California part of the U.S., they now saw little reason to preserve their “government.” Three weeks after it had been proclaimed, the California Republic quietly faded away. Sloat had taken Monterey without a fight and officially raised the American flag over California. Six days later, Fremont learned that American forces under Commodore John D.
From then on, the independence movement was known as the Bear Flag Revolt.Īfter the rebels won a few minor skirmishes with Mexican forces, Fremont officially took command of the “Bear Flaggers” and occupied the unguarded presidio of San Francisco on July 1. With a cotton sheet and some red paint, they constructed a makeshift flag with a crude drawing of a grizzly bear, a lone red star (a reference to the earlier Lone Star Republic of Texas), and the words “California Republic” at the bottom. Having won a bloodless victory at Sonoma, Merritt and Ide then proceeded to declare California an independent republic.
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