With Elon Musk “pulling back” from field-marshaling the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I’ve been wondering how long it will take for us to see and feel the disintegration of society that the loss of government programs will cause. Although the perils of Trump’s tariffs are already evident, the odds are still pretty good that he will cave if the whole of Wall Street turns against him. With the agency cuts, however, there will be no backtracking from ripping out the fixtures while ripping off the Constitution and the taxpayers. Even with the retreat of our unelected Property Brother from Another Planet sledgehammering beams and partitions before even seeing a building plan, the destruction is sure to continue if only out of spite.

It’s strange America’s newfound comfort with “strategic uncertainty” and “creative destruction.” As we learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and had confirmed by reality shows like Hoarders, people are notoriously loss-averse: we will forfeit opportunities for gain to hold on to what we already have. By nature, we don’t want to let go of something (a taxpayer-funded service, for instance) we may later need.

The media have done good work explaining what will disappear with specific agencies—for instance, visualizing the loss of U.S. foreign aid funding by showing how the world relies on us for health and food, security and governance. But how do you track the collective weakening of the nation’s communities and municipalities?

We have anecdotal images in our heads—photogravures and old-timey scenes of a closing frontier, where the single industry dried up or was made obsolete by technological innovation. The western ghost towns after the gold rush, the outposts with the drunken gunfighters and corrupt sheriffs, the Southern depot towns gone to seed because of the shuttering of railroads, the Lost Cause inertia in the plays of Tennessee Williams.

And then there’s New York City in the 1970s, when optimism hit rock bottom and movies like Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver dragged the decaying city like a muffler scaping along the Cross Bronx Expressway. Even more prevalent during this time was the Rust Belt decline throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Photographer Stephen Shore’s Steel Town (2021) collects images he took in towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State while on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1977. Jack Teemer’s 1980s photographs of Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, and other Ohio cities examine the ways in which working-class neighborhoods, and especially backyards, have been shaped by the expiring industries surrounding them.

More recently, Gregory Halpern in his Buffalo photos and Niko Kallianiotis in his Pennsylvania photos collected in America in a Trance (2018) depict sparse urban landscapes and inhabitants making do in the shadow of dying manufacturing. Beyond these photojournalists, there’s the fine art of Gregory Crewdson’s staged scenes in frail and crumbling drive-through towns just off the Massachusetts Turnpike—places reclaimed by nature amid chronic disuse.

But then this sad, slow death of once-thriving manufacturing centers was caused by the pullout of business, not government services. In fact, sometimes the only thing left in these decimated cities was government services.

Perhaps the most instantaneous visualization of decline you can get is It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 film where Jimmy Stewart’s George Baliey is in a sudden financial bind with the family Building and Loan business. He sees no way out except jumping off a bridge on Christmas Eve, only to be “saved” by the intervention of an angel, who allows George to visit the town of Bedford Falls in a world where George Bailey was never born.

Without George, the evil banker Henry Potter has taken over, turning this angelic town somewhere in Upstate New York into the poverty- and vice-stricken Pottersville, where everyone seems to spit nails. This movie is loved for being uplifting, but it paints a pretty dismal picture of the work of communities, since this one can’t unite against a villainous banker. And government has no role to play whatsoever.

When you think about it, Frank Capra’s film is the perfect MAGA movie, since the moral seems to be (metaphorically at least) that the only way to stop a bad banker with a gun is with a good real estate developer with a gun. What saves Bedford Falls from demoralization is the hero. It doesn’t take a village; it takes a white man with a pretty wife at home. MAGA would also go for this film because it doesn’t attack predatory bankers per se, just the one Scroogey specimen who pockets eight grand of the Building and Loan’s money without repercussions.

Another strange aspect about It’s a Wonderful Life is the very idea of a regressive Pottersville flourishing in the Upstate wartime economy. I grew up there in the 1970s and can remember numerous great aunts showing me photos of how vital cities like Utica and Elmira used to be in the 1940s, when manufacturing boomed in factory towns all along the old Erie Canal. This was the start of an exceptional period when the inequality inherent in capitalism was reversed through state intervention and the Mr. Potters of the world had to pay up.

In 1944, the U.S. income tax rate for top earners reached an all-time high of 94% and remained above 90% until 1963. The corporate tax rate reached an all time high of 52.8% in 1968. Not only were unions strong and popular, a 1954 musical about labor troubles and romance in a pajama factory packed the house on Broadway with songs about how a wage increase of seven and half cents an hour is enough to be living like a king.

The Marshall Plan for Europe and Japan gave the United States a plethora of markets in which to sell American-made stuff. The GI Bill enabled returning servicemen and women to go to college and get low-interest, no-down-payment loans in burgeoning suburban developments everywhere you looked. For white people at least, communities like Levittown—supported by the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration, and other government initiatives—were the gateway to a new social class.

In the 1950s, federally funded computing systems like the U.S. Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment project got early mainframe computers running, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency provided funding for research into AI. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 created NASA, and eleven years later the agency put U.S. astronauts on the moon.

All of this was brought to you not by your friendly neighborhood Spiderman but by the staid old U.S. government.

Maybe not so much in 1946, but 25 years later, America suddenly seemed to be full of towns suffering an acute lack of one mythical George Bailey. According to Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute, “Workers’ output-per-hour continued to rise, but their wages and benefits flattened. Almost all of the gains from the increased productivity of the last three and a half decades went to corporate investors and their top managers. The poverty rate rose by a third.”

Is that what it will be like after DOGE—the great unwinding of the 1970s, when underfunded cities buckled after white people funneled themselves and their tax dollars into an amorphous strip-mall sprawl? When you add gated communities and HMOs to tee up a war between those who own property and those who don’t, our situation becomes more like the seventies than even the seventies. The 1974 photograph on the dustjacket of Shore’s Uncommon Places shows the parking lot of a Sambo’s restaurant (yes, there was a chain actually called that) where an endless paved terrain is strewn with inert sedans that lie like beached whales under a gray sky. The picture calls to mind a refugee camp for a nation of confused nomads, unsure of what they were promised when they gassed up.

Shore took his photo the same year that Sidney Lumet filmed Dog Day Afternoon, which is based on a flubbed 1972 bank heist and hostage situation in Brooklyn. This might be the most anti-MAGA picture of all time, with a strange currency a half century on. First, the hapless robbers hit a bank that has no cash (which would probably be the case today, right?), so all they have to take is hostages. Then we learn that Al Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik had wanted the bank robbery money to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation. (Given Trump’s push to stop federal funding from institutions that provide gender-affirming care for teenagers, you can see how a situation like this might develop.) Then, in trying to negotiate with a battalion of cops, Sonny invokes the Attica prison riot and the assembled crowd starts cheering for him, their own version of Luigi Mangione. Even the hostages seem to be on the side of the robbers, which many New Yorkers would understand since no one trusts the cops.

Dog Day Afternoon is a black comedy, but it gives us a version of George Bailey that seems about right for the country we live in today—a country where the evil Mr. Potters run not just the banks and the pajama factories but the electric vehicle companies and the aerospace companies and the social media companies. And while their deficit hawk proprietors seem to thrive on government handouts, in the angel world at least, no one is getting their wings. §