Modern Tribalism:
In 1949 Los Angeles and America were at the pinnacle of leadership in the free world…Korea and Vietnam had not yet happened, Hitler was defeated, and there was a great promise of a new world order focused on the U.N. and the atom.

In the real world, Korea, recession and the Soviet Union squared off against that dream.  But in the world of Threads, the change was even more severe.  In the course of a year, Los Angeles was thrown into a feudal state, where the only day to day concerns were feeding the masses and keeping down a massive revolt.  From the promise of 1949 the leaders of L.A. found themselves facing Nero’s Rome or France of the Jacquerie.

Humans stripped down to fighting for the basic needs…food, shelter, sex…are bestial.  But in L.A. the myth of American middle-class society, reinforced by the “great compromise” of perpetuating the fiction of U.S. rule, led to an inability to admit these things.

Over the next ten years L.A. degenerated to facing two key issues.  How to eat, and how not to be eaten by the lower classes.  That's a big fall.  Like the Roman Empire when it collapsed, there was a fall to Tribalism.  "Below the Street" that means gangs.  "Above the Street" the reaction has been stranger.  It is not as if 1950s middle americans can admit that they are now feudal barbarians living only not to be slain in a peasant revolt and set a table.  So various types of tribal behavior have evolved.
 
The culture of L.A. is a study in lies.  The pretense of middle class stability rests on a vast underclass of poor who will never enjoy any of the privileges of the middle class.  There is no stability…the upper class is a thin fiction propped up by the Technosphere. 

So there must be outlets for stress.  At Standard, the route is that of the Soviet Union under Stalin and Beria.  Elaborate cocktail parties and rituals, lasting until dawn, with an undercurrent of savagery.  At ParaCentury the studio culture of the 1930s already supported a culture of parties, decadence, and debauchery.  Very little has really changed since Producer Thomas Ince was mysteriously shot aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida in 1928