I mean on one hand we can do better but on the other, last I checked there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism. Closest we came was the red scare in the 50s and that was tame in comparison to what Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro and Ho Chi Minh and (do I need to keep going?) put their subjects through.

>there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism

There is a time where American citizens are hauled off to prison to do slave labour. That time is right now.

For disparaging capitalism?

In many cases, for nothing at all! Fabricated charges are extremely common in the American southeast.

Extraordinary claims require evidence.

Again, the US is not perfect. This doesn't invalidate my point in the top level comment.

The entire justification for Musk's DOGE & MAGA is that the status quo in the USA is not good and needs to be torn down.

From my observation, the West suffers from the opposite of Chinese or Indian nationalism, in excessive self-flagellation to the point of self-destructiveness. Critical Theory, Identity Politics, Woke, Anti-Woke, Postmodernism (both left & right), etc would be immediately crushed in those nationalist societies, they are very much a unique artifact of the Western order.

It's really a result of the US being so heterogeneous. One side's status quo is the other side's in-progress radical reinvention. The pendulum is always on the move. You have to take the average position on a longer time scale to figure out where the country stands.