We've tended to go to war (hot or cold) with them before they have the chance to compete.

And here, I thought war (hot or cold) was competition.

I get that momentum is hard to overcome, but I think a sufficiently competitive system will overcome that barrier and eventually outcompete capitalism as we know it; we haven't found that system yet, though it's theoretically possible we've tossed out some better systems that weren't better enough to overcome the first-mover-after-WWII advantage.

I think the major innovation of the next paradigm shift will relate to how groups of people handle intergenerational wealth (and perhaps some related structural questions), as I think this is the most glaring inefficiency of the American system. This is a minefield of a problem with a lot of naive, popular answers.

Plenty of social democracies about that have a good standard of living for more people.

But if the number of players on the bench keep increasing while those on the field keep decreasing, you might start to wonder if there's a problem, or if the Warriors will be back to play next season.

Well, all of Scandinavia have better societies than the US by a range of measures, and they’re certainly much less capitalist.

Having grown up in Sweden, I'd say that's mostly history by now.

It used to work a lot better, but they've been privatizing and monetizing non-stop during my life so far and it's mostly same ice cream/different flavor these days from what I can see.

Yep, Sweden is unfortunately a long way from "the middle way" these days.