Oren Cass doesn't seem to realize or admit that his definition of the "free market" is actually a variation of China's definition. If you abandon free trade and adopt a highly protectionist policy that bans / restricts trade with all foreign entities that don't advance US national interests, and force people to "buy American" via allocating a large % of the domestic market to domestic companies, that's basically a more extreme version of China's economic policy. The only "free market" being practiced then is among domestic companies, which funny enough, is also what China does.
So talking about not allowing China to corrupt US "democratic capitalism," while advocating for China's economic strategy, is the height of irony. It looks like more and more US think tanks are realizing that their current strategy is strictly inferior to China's, but not wanting to admit intellectual defeat, they spin up a version of China's strategy as MY WESTERN GENIUS and coat it with terms like "democracy" and "free market" to fool the American public. Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn't that stupid.
Any way, the central problem with "democratic capitalism" is that the two terms are fundamentally contradicting. Democracy is populist, while capitalism is elitist. The former aims to decentralize power; the latter aims to concentrate it. They are always in tension, and while that tension can be managed, it works, but eventually it tips to one side or another because keeping two forces perfectly even is impossible in the long-term. As with the failed European experiment of detente and balance of power, so too will "democratic capitalism" eventually collapse. We are already seeing the signs - where Western think tanks are eager to blame China for the decline of their institutions, in fact it is their own system's instability that they are witness to. The corruption of democracy by capitalism is as certain as it is inevitable.
