in-group

They are both cultural in-group, out-group constructs, they just happen to be different constructs rather than synonyms.

In performance oriented cultures it's very common to shit on each other as an in-group building behavior.

But you are right, this fact is more often invoked to justify smug in-group monocultures.

If you aren't part of an in-group or friendly enough with a particular department then your coworkers become an impediment to getting things done.

The humor tends to be sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, and in-group.

The study presented a very conservative finding, which is that men who lose in online games are more likely to be hostile, particularly towards those they don't think are in the in-group.

We had the chance, as a programmer subculture, to leave this ridiculous and arbitrary in-group/out-group stuff behind, but instead we embraced it and turned it up to eleven.

This model is very good at rewarding the in-group and punishing the out-group, often by a winner-take-all tyranny of the majority, but it's ineffective and inefficient at actually getting things done or satisfying the voting public overall.

Regarding the use of the word among black men to mean "buddy", sure, my older Italian relatives used to call each other "wop" as a in-group term of affection.

Rather, I was asserting that the use of the term "liberal" is a weasel word meant to refer to a in-group centered around the Democratic Party, not any political ideology.