Do you think this is only uniquely happening now? I can’t think of a time on earth that hasn’t happened, implicitly or explicitly. (Depending on your definition of “tribe”...tribe of one?). The exceptions don’t last long: Nazi Germany, Mao’s China (Xi’s?), Stalin’s Soviet Union...

Never has it been easier to see this clearly, though, than in the current era of instant access and sharing of information and opinion.

But in the US, individuals thinking on their own is almost a core cultural value. Although more honor'd in the breach than in the observance in some circles.

Not just because the founding of the US was based upon a break with convention of colonization and an hereditary royalist system. Most immigrants (at least before the age of air travel) made a radical permanent individual decision to leave the Old World and come to the Americas, when most around them were staying. So it is in the DNA, so to speak.

Still a core value to most in the US, I would venture to say. We honor self-reliance and unconventionality when we read Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for example. Might be a more significant core value for the heartland of the US than the coastals. Farming will do that to a person.

You folks are still reading Emerson and the like, right?

Seems like a combination of the two to me