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People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.
My friend group here, despite being very adjacent to the LGBT community, has no actual LGBT people in it. (At most, It has the occasional straight chick who talks about Queerness a lot). And this isn't because we keep the LGBTs out, it's because none of us are "cool" enough for them; we dont speak in reddit-isms, too much of our conversation isn't about politics, and when one of them does wander in, we dont relentlessly praise their LGBTness like I presume other straight people do, we keep playing D&D. Oh, and the system we use doesn't have Tieflings in it, that's a big barrier. This suits me just fine.
Despite being full of minorities and anti-racists, the neighborhoods are still racially sorted somehow. It can't be the fault of conservatives, since there's none of them here.
Tribalism is alive and well in cities. By comparison, people outside of cities don't quake in performative fear when someone they don't know exists in their general vicinity, they don't constantly screech about all the things they hate, and what LGBT and People of Color that do exist there seem far more willing to socialize with non-queer/non-of-color people without making the entire interaction about queerness or of-color-ness.
Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror. He arguably hated them way less than black people.
Blue Tribers hating on Trump, tech bros, cops, billionaires, rich people, straightness and men are all hating on other blue tribers. (It's the local cops they object to, not random cops in small-town Iowa, and Trump is a renegade Blue Triber). "White people" is a corner case - white people performative hating on white people is mostly a weapon in intra-Blue status games, but can also be an expression of hatred for the Reds. But that is a quibble - more fundamentally, I think you are extrapolating from very online minorities. I have spent a lot of time professionally around PMC Blue Tribe Americans, and for most of them the only time they performatively hate on right-wing outgroups is for an hour a year as part of mandatory workplace diversity training. My more limited experience travelling in Red America is consistent - the minority of politically engaged Reds engage in performative hatred on the Blue target du jour (at the time it was Hilary Clinton) but the grill-pilled majority try not to talk about politics with otherwise-friendly strangers.
If stoking tribal hatred was popular with normies, American politics would not look the way it does. Poasters chasing clout online maximise tribal hatred, but both parties try to turn it down during general election campaigns (Trump with far more success than Harris, which is part of why he won) because it is a vote-loser.
All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.
Three separate people said "ewww, there's a lot of white people around here" while wandering around the north side with me in 2020. Way back when I brushed it off, and went on to regret associating with them after how they behaved later.
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Blacks with more red tribe adjacency(lots of them working in the trades, but bowhunting is the real reliable way to meet them) are real popular with the red tribe, generally. The tribalism in the US is about different kinds of white people hating each other, I don't see a massive difference between the two tribes in terms of actual dislike, and the fact of the matter is that we're too different to be friends easily so some tensions are always going to be there.
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Yeah, that's one thing I like about "At the Mountains of Madness". Narrator starts off with "these horrible alien things attacked us and maybe even ate some of our dead" and ends with "they're people like us, we have much more in common than with the true monstrosities".
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