This isn’t just a political failure. It’s an epistemological crisis that reveals something fundamental about how the technocratic liberal establishment understands reality itself. They’ve become trapped in what I call “the analytical frame”—a mode of thinking that treats complex social and political realities as problems to be solved through expert analysis rather than ongoing tensions to be navigated through democratic engagement.

I’m aware of the paradox here—using analytical tools to critique analytical overreach. But the problem isn’t analysis itself; it’s analysis that forgets its own contingency, that mistakes provisional frameworks for final truth, that treats temporary models as permanent descriptions of reality.

The analytical frame worked reasonably well during periods of relative stability, when complexity remained within the boundaries of existing models and institutions. But it becomes actively counterproductive when complexity explodes beyond those boundaries—which is exactly what’s happening in our current moment of technological acceleration, epistemic collapse, and democratic breakdown. The experts keep trying to choreograph a dance that requires improvisation.