A cliché of a television commercial for an expensive executive-type car might go like this: an unnaturally youthful older man, with grey stubble, and modelling a grey polo neck that shows off his lean physique, operates a grey garage door and later relaxes by the glow of his fireplace, toying with his scotch on the rocks as the camera pans out to reveal a grey slate modernist mantlepiece.

Perhaps because wisdom is supposed to be attainable with age, greyness comes along with power and wealth. It’s no coincidence that the most expensive BMW in its range comes in 12 colours and 9 of them are shades of grey, and this extends to a worldview. When confronted with any dilemma we tend to defer to the mantra of the wise old man of Springfield, Grandpa Simpson, “a little from column A and a little from column B”. After all, isn’t the mark of critical thinking the ability to avoid black and white answers and revel in nuanced and insightful shades of grey?

Grey is the hue of self-assurance, composure and indifferentness to the trivial need to commit. Grey, like a lake behind a dam, may seem calm, but it’s brimming with potential. Grey reflects the elite’s pose: sitting comfortably on the fence, avoiding commitment one way or another, effortlessly looking all the more sophisticated for it. Because, really, why choose sides when you can just hover in stylish ambiguity?

Ironically, actual decision-making, even in our complex world, in essence comes down to a choice between black and white, this or that, yes or no. Take politics in “advanced democracies”. The intricate dance of economic interests, philosophical models, sociological frameworks and even psychological factors that goes into the process of politics is reduced to a single, humble X at the ballot box. You might fancy yourself above it all – spoiling your ballot, abstaining, or even dreaming of electoral reform – but let’s not kid ourselves. Each of these apparently alternative options are just iterations of the same binary choice. Possibly the most complex computer program to date is the Google search engine with about two billion lines of code, but they are all, in essence, binary strings of zeros and ones.

For over two decades the prevailing feature of Western democracy has been the presentation of candidates that seem to be a carefully-curated selection of people graded according to despicability. It was during the run-off of the French presidential election in 2002 that we first heard the slogan “Un escroc mieux qu’un facho”, better the crook than the fascist. The slogan was a rallying cry for increased voter turn-out in the second round of the election after general malaise with corrupt and incompetent traditional party politics had opened up the field to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far right candidate.

Greyness is a fog that separates the privileged outsider from the roughness of history, numbs their senses and confuses the issues. 

Perhaps we are naive to hope for aspirational choices in democracies, and ought to resign ourselves to politics as a fixed choice between the lesser of two evils. The trend that started with Le Pen found its apogee in Trump. Should we not ask why? The sense that forcing the public to vote for the least worst option time and time again might be a motor in the ascendency of far right post-political candidates has been ignored by much of the centrist commentariat. In the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016, the editor of a progressive newspaper discussed with me over dinner the need to understand better what had just happened. His main solution was to offer a regular column to a man whose recent memoir about growing up in the Appalachian mountains was enthralling the liberal commentariat. JD Vance was at the time the toast of liberal circles who, trying to understand the reasons for Trump’s ascendency and unable to look in the mirror, found themselves digesting Vance’s unreconstructed conservative narrative that poor people are to be blamed for their own poverty. Mr Vance was and is still financed by his long-term backer, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

The impetus to reach for the middleground to one’s right, as with my friend the editor, is born of the centre-left political tactics of the 1990s. Voter triangulation has been the go-to electoral playbook of centrist politicians since Clinton and Blair. The idea is simple. First, ignore the people who would never vote for you, as well as those who always will. Concentrate rather on the wavering, floating, undecided middle, typically to your right. Second, identify what would sway them, and ask them simply what they want, in order of priority. Ignore the motivating factors – voters are consumers and politicians should be understood as service providers. Third, and finally, drop any and all talk of ideas, class, moral frameworks or other abstract concepts and don’t bother trying to convert folks. Simply deliver the promise they want to hear most. Henceforth retail politics became unmoored from ideas and enamoured of statistical and segmentation models. If the electorate is asking for less immigration but also wants more immigrants to do certain unpleasant jobs, promise to curb immigration and in practice allow what is necessary for the economy. Do not try to resolve the conflicting demands of the electorate by arguing with them. That will only lose you elections.

This tactical rulebook inevitably drags the median of political discourse to the right but also discredits politics as a whole. It presents electoral politics not as a testing ground of ideas and a platform for listening to and persuading one another but as a game of bluff to be won: see the recent example of Keir Starmer’s content-free election strategy, which is echoed in centrist excitement at Kamala Harris’s vibey but empty campaign. At the British ballot box, it matters little that fewer people voted for Starmer’s party in 2024 than for Jeremy Corbyn’s in 2019, rather that enough people in the right locations generated a majority in Parliament. The political class and the echo chamber of the commentariat despised Corbyn and worked tirelessly to bring him down: to them his popularity was a minor distraction, as is the shrunken mandate of Starmer. This is the same generation of political operatives that have presided over the general degradation of societies they have governed. In return, an ever greater number of voters reject and distrust the system as a whole.

Such cynical politics has more varied and ugly consequences than mere disaffection. We can look at the recent racist rioters in the UK as the first harvest of Starmer’s ugly fruit. Unlike the politicos, the poor, the people living in forgotten places and the people of colour in the UK don’t have the luxury of basing their politics – whether at home or abroad – in shades of grey.

Gaza is humanity at the ballot box. The Palestinian cause has always been both a matter of conscience and a matter of politics. Mark Smith, the British diplomat who resigned over the continued British participation in the genocide, is a rare exception proving the rule that the occupation has always been a black and brown issue, a rich versus poor issue and a colonised versus coloniser issue. Way back in November, many folks in good conscience failed to take sides because the issues “were too complicated”. Next, as the bodies piled up they “admired” the principled position and supported a ceasefire, but worried about repercussions or charges of antisemitism that might be levied at them for speaking out. By February, they were concerned that this had all been going on a bit too long and was starting to sound a bit boring. By the start of the summer, a friend was able to ask – commenting on a sticker on my phone – whether we were “all in on this Gaza thing”.

Such opinions come from the privileged. For them investment in such a cause – such as taking a knee or posting a black square as a gesture of anti-racism – is a purely intellectual or stylistic pose. They tend to assume that everyone will eventually walk away from this cause at some point out of boredom, or when it loses social currency. It’s their privilege that allows them the freedom to abandon the Palestinian cause as they might once have abandoned techno for drum and bass or yoga for barre. It’s the freedom that enabled many of them to so easily forget the commitments they made to anti-racism in the summer of 2020.

At the beginning of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1941), Meursault, an emotionally detached and morally indifferent French man in Algeria, kills an Arab man without any clear motive. His trial and the consequences of his actions are set out by Camus as a case for understanding the connection between individual and social morality. The story, of course, reads very differently if you are an Algerian. Meursault’s motives are confused; he cannot make his way out of the murk of his own politics, and his own self. The people with skin in the game don’t have the luxury of shades of grey. During the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics this July, the Algerian team threw roses into the river Seine as a mark of respect to as many as 300 Algerian pro-independence protesters who were killed and had their bodies dumped in the river by French police in 1961. Greyness is a fog that separates the privileged outsider from the roughness of history, numbs their senses and confuses the issues. Morality offers clarity.  Masoud Golsorkhi