Picture a factory, chugging along, churning out desireable product lapped up by an affluent and vast emptor class. Workers show up every day, punch in, and take their places on the line, pleased at least by knowledge their labor earns food on their tables and fire in hearths.

This was, for years, the American dynamic. The country was an industrial giant, fearsome example to the rest of the globe that resources, smarts and their attendant wealth could achieve any goal from curing disease to putting men on the moon and returning them home to earth alive and cheery. Like the Pharoahs' practical motives for building pyramids and sculpted monoliths of ancient Egypt, it also broadcast abroad implied "don't even think about f*cking with us" significance. Hear ye friends and foes alike: If we can do this for ourselves, think of what we can do to you.

When America was a technological and manufacturing powerhouse, we aimed lip-service worship at the lunchpail strata that achieved our bounty. Factories were too grimy and toxic to elevate as symbolic cathedrals of our burgeoning production cult, but the workers themselves were celebrated. Labor Day is a holiday echo of that hammer-and-anvil age. After paying their dues in blood and horror, unions achieved for American laborers a standard of living unmatched in the world. Sipping a beer, union-brewed, out of a can, made of ore union-mined and stamped by lords of a machinists local, an average joe could doff his blue collar a moment and enjoy a life with the comforts, if not social-anthill status, of middle class.

That horizontal affluence was just too expensive for our captains of industry, however. Little by little, America has been deindustrialized as factories relocated to foreign shores, where those troublesome environmental laws and selfish unions, always angling for their measly "living wage", were nowhere to be found. Friendly, if somewhat brutal, anti-democratic and murderous regimes were happy to see their nations play host to our new "globalization" hocus-pocus. It's one big, happy blue marble, after all. You're still thinking in terms of your own backyard? Dinosaur. What are you, a nationalist? Everything can be outsourced - even man-bites-dog scoops in your local newspaper.

We're left with a service-industry economy, made up of junior-league white collar toilers punching numbers instead of sheet-metal car bumpers, dreaming of lottery jackpots while juggling accounts for shell-game visionaries looting our vanishing, phantom markets.

But there are some reliable assembly lines left... In city halls and state capitals. And the biggest is on Capitol Hill, in that smoky swamp we call the seat of national power. Lawmakers are stocking the shelves with shiny products like those once touted in bright half-tones lining Sears catalogs, and stacked under colored pennants at shopping centers.

The new American cash-cow merchandise is legislation and influence. And lobbyists are buying.

The set-up has taken the demos - us - out of American democracy. We still elect our lawmakers, sure. But, once on job, our needs, our desires - our goals for ourselves and our children - disappear in a fog of greed and ambition somewhere just inside the cloakroom. Money talks, after all. There is no contest among "competing interests" if the most welcome among them have pockets deep as Croesus.

The health care "debate" that has so preoccupied the first months of Barack Obama's presidency crystalizes perfectly this degenerative dynamic. When Obama first outlined his proposals, loosely, as early as the 2007 debates (God, that seems long ago), the one obstacle easily recognized was the medical-industrial complex - big pharma, the insurance industry, etc. This formidable lobby had harpooned the Clinton intiatives more than 15 years ago. It hadn't weakened in the interim, it hadn't moved its enthused corruption to foreign shores.

How could it be overcome?

Well... now we know: It couldn't. It's too easy to couch this dilemma as a battle of Left and Right. It's much more complicated, and a lot more seedy, than that. Blue dog "democrats" are as delighted as anyone that the town-hall visigoths have so locked the attention of our media and discourse. This disruptive street theater has taken focus from their own far more effective and practiced dismantling of efforts to install what has been a hallmark of most "civilized" societies for more than a century.

Losing this battle underscores and intensifies our ejection from participation in our own government, and so, in the course our lives will take. Voters and democratic elections are as feckless and ceremonial as Britain's royal family. Each election day, we light votive candles for priests who worship other gods. We are left behind not so much because our demands are unattainable or overblown, but because we cannot afford - with money - our lawmakers' audience. 

This political illegitimacy spreads to our social viability, as well. In a perceptive post today, cmaukonen offers a reminder of how quickly our middle class is disappearing. I and others on this site, notably TPMGary, have speculated this dissolution of "average" status may not be simply a by-product of our current political-economic template, but a deliberate scheme to reduce the country to underdeveloped condition. Poor countries in what used to be called the "Third World", are hardscrabble, inequitable and poverty-wracked; their citizens are disenfranchised and remote from any contact with political or economic self-control. These nations are ruled by economic destitution and violent intimidation.

And these set-ups are extremely advantageous to tiny ruling elites unaccustomed to and intolerant of backtalk.

How can this future not be a fait accompli for us, Americans, as our political voices shrink and our civic footprint dissolves?