This question is a framing generated by the left’s attempt to undermining western civilization.
Democracy: a means of selecting priorities in the production of commons given the scarcity of resources and the endless demand for returns.
Republic: Representative democracy with Executive, Legislative, and Judicial division of labor.
Capitalism: a bias to the private ownership and management of production of production distribution and trade of goods, services, and information, given the natural tendencies of government organizations to produce negative returns, maximize rents, maximize corruption, minimize benefits to the people, fail at core mission, be unaccountable for doing so.
Socialism: Globalist movement for the centralization of production, distribution, and trade in the state, and pursuit of world domination by this economic model.
Democratic Socialism: a bias to the state ownership and management of resources, production distribution, and trade. (France) and maximization of distribution of benefits to citizens.
Mixed Economy: State an Private Partnership in strategic industries, private management of non-strategic industries.
Fascism: Ethnocentric, Mixed Economy, Maximizing State-Private partnerships in strategic industries, private management of non-strategic industries.
UNDERSTANDING THE USA
(a) The USA is not a country, it is a federation of states (like europe is trying and failing to create). The USA uses the British form of government, but is modeled after the holy roman empire o the german people, that only fell after napoleon’s conquest after having existed for a thousand years: a loose federation of many micro states.
(b) The USA is not a democracy. it is a Republic under rule of law – meaning LIMITED power granted to the executive, legislature and courts, by the people to act on their behalf. A republic is intended to use representatives with demonstrated evidence of skills necessary to make political economic and military decisions. (We no longer do that.)
(c) The constitution is not a living document. It is a statement of natural law, (reciprocity) and amendments, legislation, and findings of the court (case law) are transactions that modify that law. It’s an accounting system in law.
(d) The law is not open to reinterpretation or judicial discretion – the court interprets the text (textualism) as by original meaning (originalism) so that the transactions against the constitution are performed only by the legislature. (Thanks to Saint Judge Antonin Scalia.)
(d) The purpose of limiting the court to those measurements is to demanding that all changes pass thru the public debate through the legislature and that no ‘specialist, or ‘authority’ exists other than survival of adversarial competition in the legislature on behalf of the people who voted for the representatives.
(e) Rule of law does not mean rule by law. Rule of law by natural law means that the law is sovereign and every individual sovereign under it. Rule by law means the laws of the universe (natural law), and the people are not sovereignty – but the legislature is. America is the only country where the law is sovereign. Every other country now has parliamentary sovereignty. And rule of law by natural law is the only method of maintaining human adaptation to changes in circumstances (scientific government).
(f) Some form of Democracy is necessary under rule of law – because there is no authority other than the law, and therefore only the people can decide, only as a jury (congress) and only after adversarial competition (argument, and voting)
(g) Every form of Democracy functions as market. Multiple house government functions as a market between states, and classes. (We Broke that by direct election of the senate).
Markets under rule of law will produce moral consumer capitalism. Markets under rule by law will not. Markets under arbitrary rule will produce black markets. Attempting to circumvent markets will produce black markets, corruption, disincentives, starvation, and decline.
So the capitalism socialism dichotomy is a marxist deceit creating a false dichotomy. All economies are mixed economies because states are the investors of last resort and insurers of last resort.
States START capital intensive industries because they are too high risk for private markets, then must be taken over by private companies and competition in order to make efficient use of capital and disincentivize corruption.
Success at this process provides income to the state as an investor, or income to the state by taxation or both. This income is then used to create commons – goods, services, information- for the public. At least theoretically. And some is siphoned off by the bureaucracy and their clients (Special interests) as various forms of rent-seeking.
So the problem with America is that we have no method of bringing suit against the government for ‘procedural and process corruption’ – and that corruption is worse in the states than in most other countries for historical reasons.
The fact that this isn’t something every American can recite without thought is an intentional distortion of the American form of government by the left’s propaganda campaign, and ‘march through the institutions’ to destroy the meaning of terms, causes, and ideas.