The highways leading out of the American West are crowded with the caravans of the disillusioned. They are not refugees of war, but refugees of a broken promise. We see in California a tragic paradox -- a land blessed with every natural gift, yet cursed by a governance that has forgotten the nature of man.

This crisis is not merely economic. It is theological. It is the inevitable result of swapping Freedom for Excellence for Freedom of Indifference.

In the classical Christian tradition, freedom is the power to do the good. It is like the freedom of a pianist who, through discipline and structure, becomes free to play a masterpiece. A society built on this view values competence, merit, and the hard reality of results. It respects the "nature of things." It understands that you cannot spend what you do not have, and you cannot educate children by denying objective truth.

But the modern West has embraced the Freedom of Indifference. This is the Nominalist idea that freedom is simply the raw power of the Will to do whatever it pleases, unbound by nature or limit. When this philosophy captures the State, disaster follows.

The State begins to believe it can redefine reality by fiat. It looks at a forest and believes it can manage nature through paperwork -- and the forests burn. It looks at the homelessness crisis and believes it can solve spiritual despair with bureaucratic "Housing First" models that ignore the human need for agency and redemption -- and the streets fill with misery. It looks at the economy and believes it can tax productivity into oblivion while sustaining prosperity -- and the middle class flees.

This is the "inhuman humanism" of our time. It is a system that loves "Humanity" in the abstract but crushes the actual human person.

Yet, we see a disturbing trend in public discourse. The defenders of this failing system often shout "Fascism!" at its critics. This is a verbal sleight of hand. It points to the "strong man" model of the past to distract from the "soft totalitarianism" of the present.

As the great thinkers of the 20th century warned us, the new totalitarianism does not always arrive in jackboots. It arrives in the guise of the social worker and the tax collector. It arrives with the promise of total security. It says to the citizen: "Give us your liberty, your property, and your children's education, and we will give you safety."

But observe the result. The model which promised a utopia of equity has recreated feudalism. There is the new Aristocracy -- the technocrats and the billionaires who can afford the high cost of living. There is the new Peasantry -- the dependent poor, trapped in a cycle of subsidies and addiction, stripped of the dignity of work. And the Yeomanry -- the independent middle class -- is being erased.

This is what happens when the State attempts to be God. It tries to provide everything, and in doing so, it consumes everything.

We must recover the concept of Subsidiarity. This is the Catholic principle that the State should never do what the family or the local community can do for itself. High-speed rail projects that consume billions without laying track are not just administrative failures. They are moral failures. They represent the arrogance of a distant power that believes its abstract plans are superior to the concrete needs of the people.

To critique this is not "fascism." It is the defense of the human person. It is the insistence that the State exists to serve man, not man to serve the State. We must return to a politics that is humble, one that respects the limits of power and the dignity of the free, creative individual made in the image of God.