Less ‘Keeping It Real,’ Please

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Spoiler alert: At the end of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star.

 

He does this by following Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice and training. He uses the Force. When he uses the targeting system of his X-wing starfighter, his proton torpedoes miss their target. The disembodied Kenobi tells him, “Use the Force, Luke,” so he puts away the targeting system, closes his eyes, and searches his feelings. That does the trick, because as Darth Vader says of Skywalker, “the Force is strong” with him. Oh, another spoiler alert: Darth Vader is Luke’s father.

 

Star Wars is widely described as science fiction, but it’s really not. As George Lucas explained many times, it’s really more of an exploration of myth, a space opera without the singing.

 

The idea that one can merely consult one’s feelings to find a deeper truth or superior skill is a mainstay of Western culture.

 

I’ll give you some examples off the top of my head:

 

Maverick in Top Gun explains, “You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re dead.” In The Matrix, Neo masters his powers simply by believing. Accept that there is no spoon and you can dodge bullets. The rules are not rules. In Bull Durham, Crash Davis explains to the mule-headed Nuke, “Don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club.” In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee tells us, “Don’t think. Feel.” Tom Cruise gets basically the same advice in The Last Samurai.

 

We teach children this stuff from a very early age. It’s the soul of The Catcher in the Rye. Schools emphasize self-esteem over self-discipline. In the early 1970s, with the help of government funding, starting with Captain Kangaroo, TV stations across America ran a series dedicated to the idea that “You’re the most important person.” I must have heard this song a thousand times when I was a kid: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you—and you hardly even know you!”

 

Hollywood still teaches this stuff, even without government funding. In Frozen, Elsa realizes her powers when she decides to ignore her hangups, and “Just Let It Go.” Harry Potter doesn’t win his battles because he’s the best student or the best-trained wizard, he wins them because he cares more. In Kung Fu Panda, Po discovers that mastery of kung fu comes not from some secret ingredient or training, but from self-acceptance and belief.

 

This isn’t just the stuff of pop culture and education-major pabulum, these are the themes of Romanticism, transcendentalism, and, to some extent, Protestantism. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” he tells us that the highest duty, and the path to wisdom, can be found in the exhortation to “trust thyself.”

 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

 

Obi-Wan couldn’t say it better.

 

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Still, I should be clear: This stuff isn’t necessarily bad. Indeed, I think some of it is inseparable from art and literature, not to mention rock ’n’ roll and jazz. It’s also as American as any idea can be, though America hardly has a monopoly on it, given that its literary high-water mark can be found in English literature. It’s a human thing. It’s also very much a Western thing, with the West’s disproportionate emphasis on the individual.

 

Indeed, there’s a reason why this stuff appeals so much to young people. When we’re young, we struggle to navigate the rules of society, and we’re full of hormones and the feelings they fuel. Our passions and egos convince us that the world outside us is populated by people who don’t really “get” us. Even hyper-rationalists can fall prey to this kind of thinking. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s heroes are the independent creators and producers; her villains are the mass of “second-handers,” “looters,” “moochers,” and “parasites”—people who either cannot create, will not think, or seek moral and political power over those who do. No one who loves Atlas Shrugged—and there are millions who do—ever thinks they’re one of the moochers or second-handers, just as no one who falls in love with Nietzsche believes they are one of the Last Men.

 

Living downstream.

 

My late friend Andrew Breitbart popularized the phrase “politics is downstream of culture.”

 

But the idea was hardly original to him. It stretches from Plato and Aristotle to Burke, Montesquieu, and de Tocqueville. But let’s stay on Burke. “Every age has its own manners, and its politicks dependent upon them,” Burke observed in his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.” Elsewhere, he writes:

 

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law can touch us here and there. Now and then, we are liable, for a little excess, to a severe discussion. But manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like the air we breathe.

 

The key to understanding Burke is to understand that he considered principles very important, but he didn’t think they were everything. Every good principle, taken to an extreme, can become a bad principle. Reason is important, but it’s not everything. Monarchy is good, but an absolute monarchy that becomes tyrannical is bad. Tradition, history, and free commerce were his lodestars, but he believed you could follow any one lodestar into a dead end. Judgment, “prescription,” “prejudice” (though not in the modern sense), recognition of trade-offs—these were the guardrails of his mind.

 

Often, the people who use Breitbart’s “politics is downstream of culture” pronouncement use it shallowly. They tend to see culture purely as a political issue that divides partisans. Obviously, there are many such issues. My problem with this tendency is that it’s like standing by the stream precisely where it splits into two tributaries. It fails to appreciate that our politics are colored by our culture much further upstream.

 

For instance, we’re used to thinking that “libertarianism” is a thing that libertarians believe. Some see libertarianism as part of the right, and one branch, or really several branches, of libertarianism are. But there are countless libertarian ideas held by conservatives who don’t consider themselves libertarians. And yet, they are nonetheless passionate believers in “libertarian” ideas, from free speech to property rights to the Second Amendment to religious liberty. I think most people can see this quite easily. What many struggle with is the idea that the left has a libertarian streak, too. Many on the left are also passionate about free speech and even property rights and religious liberty—when it’s their property or their religion, at least. Defunding the police and abolishing the “carceral state” are profoundly stupid ideas, in my opinion. But they are also deeply libertarian. Drug legalization is a libertarian idea that crosses the ideological divide. The point is that what we call the “libertarian” perspective is in many respects an American perspective because Americans have an extremely individualistic, philosophically liberal culture.

 

The people who say “politics is downstream of culture” see these issues from the vantage point of where the stream divides, rather than illustrations of the much broader current. Abortion is perhaps the ur-culture war issue. But without launching a huge debate, it is a contest between two fundamentally libertarian-ish worldviews about autonomy, agency, and individual rights. Pro-lifers see the fetus as a human with the first of all individual rights—the right to life. Abortion rights supporters see a woman with sovereign rights that the fetus does not have. To be sure, the argument from both sides rests on a disagreement about certain fact claims—how to think about the unborn—but philosophically it’s a conflict between two different rights claims and how the state should intercede to protect the rights, real or alleged, of the parties involved.

 

In short, all of American politics, not just the emergent issues that get our attention, are downstream of culture. But here’s the thing: The culture is not really a stream at all. It’s an ocean. Creatures that live in the ocean don’t know they’re wet.

 

When the levees break.

 

I am perilously close to horribly mangling metaphors, so having fired my salvo, let me switch metaphors by pulling up like Luke Skywalker after successfully using the Force to destroy the Death Star. 

 

I have a Burkean outlook when it comes to our culture’s love affair with the Romantic hero. It’s great where it’s great, in art and literature and movies; it’s complicated in other realms. In business, it can be useful when we empower the entrepreneur, the inventor, even the salesman, to reject conventional wisdom to innovate and create wealth. But the employee who thinks that he has to “keep it real” and rob the company in a misplaced rage at having to submit his TPS reports is a criminal. The teacher who inspires his students to think imaginatively is great. The one who takes the “Captain, my Captain” schtick so far that his student kills himself out of despair at going to medical school might want to tone it down. The journalist who blazes a trail to make a name for herself is great. The one who plagiarizes or makes up quotes to gain fame has missed the point.

 

These are extreme examples—life is full of harder judgment calls. Finding the line is less a science than an art. It’s a bit like telling provocative jokes. When it works, we laugh. When it doesn’t, we wince. One of my problems with today’s culture is that too many people go for the wince on the false assumption that makes them braver or more “authentic.”

 

I’m more than 1,600 words in, so I need to wrap this up. But I started out wanting to talk about our culture’s obsession with authenticity. When it’s Thoreau writing about fleeing conformity to embrace authenticity, there’s much to admire or contemplate. When it’s jackasses on social media being obnoxious or cruel for the “lulz,” it’s a sign of a disordered culture.

 

We’ve horribly confused ourselves. We think authenticity is the fullest expression of individuality, and we’ve lost the ability to identify what actually constitutes authenticity. Some people are authentic fools, or bullies, or narcissists. Telling them to “search your feelings” is like telling an alcoholic to do another shot. Moreover, defying conventions for attention is not authenticity, it’s performance and play-acting, which is definitionally a form of fakery. Negative attention is not proof that you’re “keeping it real” when that negative attention takes the form of telling someone they’re being an ass. Indeed, contrarianism purely for the sake of contrarianism isn’t heroism, it’s a form of asininity.

 

I thought I was going to ground these points in the effort to market Graham Platner as “authentic,” but I don’t think I need to bother. Josh Barro does an excellent job of poking holes in all that. Platner is a kind of unreliable loser that our culture wants to celebrate as a kind of authentic rebuke of “the system.”

 

Popular culture is the lingua franca of our lives these days. I am the first to acknowledge that I enjoy speaking that language as much as anybody. But the rules of popular culture, of entertainment, aren’t the rules of real life. In American Beauty, an execrable and wildly overpraised film, the protagonist has an epiphany that the dull, bourgeois, suburban life he’s been living is inauthentic. He has to be true to himself and keep it real. “I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years. And I’m just now waking up,” declares Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). He commits himself to a new, authentic path of getting high, seeking sexual conquest, and sticking it to the man. “Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go f—k himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus,” Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

 

Now, however interesting you might think Lester Burnham is as a character, in real life a Lester Burnham is a piece of garbage. In real life, we sacrifice the alleged ecstasy of authentic self-indulgence to be responsible spouses, parents, and citizens. In movies, anti-heroes can break the rules to fulfill their desires. But we’re supposed to expect something more, something better, from our political leaders (starting with, you know, the president).

 

When politics becomes another form of popular entertainment, the rules of entertainment become the standards for politics. The older concepts of civic virtue emphasized self-mastery, conquering your impulses to serve a higher cause. Today’s politics treats self-mastery as suspect, a form of fakery or selling out, while asinine self-exposure is proof of depth and authenticity. The older republican tradition asked whether a man could govern himself before entrusting him with power. The new authenticity politics asks whether he seems sufficiently ungoverned to be trusted. 

 

“Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law” is the line from “America the Beautiful.” That idea is a joke in American Beauty and, increasingly, in Washington.