Ideas

Trump Is Making Socialism Great Again

Capitalism needs better advocates.

First published in The Atlantic on July 27, 2025

by David Frum, The Atlantic
July 31, 2025 | reading time: 14 Min.

In the 1980s, the world’s largest producer of shoes was the Communist Soviet Union. In his 1994 book, Dismantling Utopia, Scott Shane reported that the U.S.S.R. “was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year—twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.”

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