To watch two days of hearings on how -- or whether -- Congress should rescue Detroit's close-to-failing automakers is to be haunted by a recurring question: How did we get here?

I don't mean the fine technical points of product plans, quality, fuel efficiency, market share, financial reports and brand image -- or lack thereof. That story we know, especially here, in all its excruciating detail. I mean the broader strokes of a country that has moved further into the future, or so it clearly felt this week, than the three automakers from Detroit.

The CEOs of once-powerful engines of American industry, whose might helped win World War II and whose wealth helped build the middle class, are reduced to lobbying for emergency financial aid from politicians straining to understand the car business. The president of the United Auto Workers is forced to defend 70 years of bargaining, a model fast disappearing from American business.

The industry's chief defender in Congress, Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, is being challenged for the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee -- the most important to automakers -- by a rival from Beverly Hills. As in California, that stronghold of blue-collar industrialism.

And a son of Michigan who ran for president and carried his native state in the Republican primary argued in The New York Times on Wednesday that the best way to save Detroit's automakers is to let them go bankrupt. That from Mitt Romney, whose father ran American Motors Corp. before becoming Michigan's governor.

How did we get here?

To listen to the questions from House members Wednesday, and the Senate Banking Committee the day before, is to hear a few answers. For they represent the much bigger chunk of America that doesn't live and work in the Detroit automotive bubble, where a peculiar, Detroitified understanding of basic economics took root decades ago and only recently began a radical overhaul.

Saying so isn't anti-Detroit, anti-union or anti-Big Three. It's recognizing the spectacle on Capitol Hill for what it was -- concerned lawmakers, facing a scary recession, trying to understand how Detroit came to this point and whether it can muster the mettle to get out with the help of $25 billion in "bridge loans" from the feds.

"What does the other side of the bridge look like," asked Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., a former auto dealer. "What are you going to do differently than what you were perhaps planning to do six months ago?"

Added Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y.: "When my wife has a problem with the foreign car she drives, they bend over backwards for her. You all aren't responsive to your customers. You don't want to put your last tourniquet to a dead guy. Tell me what's going to be different in three months."

There was Massachusetts Democrat Michael Capuano saying that his constituents didn't "trust" Detroit to get it right. And Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., wanted assurances the Big Three would match the "Honda in Indiana" he'd heard so much about so they wouldn't come back for more money.

The bigger America, given voice this week in Congress, mostly doesn't know J.D. Power surveys from the Harbour Report. It doesn't care where the Ford Fusion is built, how Cadillac is a real comeback story, whether last year's UAW concessions are enough, why Chrysler's still is big in minivans or what Detroit already has done to restructure its ailing U.S. business.

The bigger America, whose lawmakers are being asked to spend taxpayer money to keep Detroit alive, has more basic questions: Why don't you make a profit? How long till you run out of cash? Will you be back asking us for more? Why didn't you start sooner making more fuel efficient vehicles? Why do you pay people not to work? Wouldn't bankruptcy be a better option for you -- and taxpayers?

The questions can rankle those steeped in Detroit-ese. But most of the rest of the country isn't. They know this: GM, Ford and Chrysler are closing plants, cutting jobs, losing dealerships and seeking a financial lifeline from the feds, even if they are building better products, offering more gas-electric hybrids, boosting fuel efficiency and leveling labor costs with their foreign competition.

Those outside the Detroit bubble also know that Japanese, Korean and German automakers are opening plants in more states, are keeping more workers on payrolls that generally have been expanding, are losing fewer sales in harsh times and claim, altogether, a larger chunk of the American auto market than Detroit does.

Detroit's retreat into Fortress Midwest and its deep financial problems, made dire by this fall's credit crisis and plunging consumer confidence, have sent a message to those left behind, on the outside, and it's probably more negative than positive. That may not fully explain what's actually changing inside these companies -- and I don't think it does -- but it shaped a perception based in some measure of reality.

A bigger America said as much this week, in Capitol Hill hearing rooms, whether we like it or not.