Politics & Power Quote by Peter Singer

Singer’s line lands like a polite scalpel: it’s less a compliment about Bush’s moral clarity than a warning about branding. “Realpolitik” names the hard-nosed, interest-driven style of statecraft that admits its cynicism up front. Saying Bush “doesn’t present himself” that way shifts the focus from what Bush does to how he wants to be read. The target isn’t merely policy; it’s the self-portrait.

The subtext is that Bush’s public rhetoric trades in moral narrative - freedom, evil, duty - while the machinery of power hums along beneath it. Singer is flagging a dissonance that matters ethically: if leaders justify coercion, war, or strategic alliances as moral necessity rather than strategic calculation, they claim a higher exemption from scrutiny. Realpolitik can be condemned, but it’s at least legible. Moralized politics, by contrast, can make contestable choices feel like destiny.

Contextually, this reads as early-2000s vocabulary: post-9/11, the “war on terror,” Iraq, and the broader attempt to frame U.S. action as principled rather than transactional. Singer, a philosopher known for pushing uncomfortable ethical accounting, is implicitly asking the public to separate ends from the story told about them. The line works because it treats image as an ethical variable: when a president refuses the realist label, he isn’t just avoiding cynicism; he’s competing for moral authority. That competition raises the stakes of every decision, because hypocrisy isn’t merely a character flaw here - it’s a permission slip.