There is no capitalism vs. socialism conflict. Those terms have definable meanings, but they have been hijacked for contriving a conflict. Some conservatives pretend that socialism is an opposite of capitalism, so liberals who promote socialism must be anti-capitalists.

Capitalism has never been in question. No one has escaped capitalism since stones were traded by the evolving great apes. Socialism is not a war against capitalism but an improvement upon it by correcting injustices against the needy.

There is an extreme version of capitalism (austerity) that is often promoted by conservatives and opposed by liberals, but that conflict needs a different terminology, which does exist but is avoided by the conservatives who promote it in their need to conceal the truth of the injustices.

In other words, the maligned terminology must be avoided in describing the truth of the conflict. The perpetrators of injustice depend heavily upon maligned terminology, as they speak in opposites pretending to save mankind from a fake evil by producing a lesser of evils—the destruction of economies as a weapon against the lower classes.

The destroyers of economies use the term capitalism as a pretense of protecting the essence of existence as if they were protecting the hardness of rocks with the implication that their opponents were trying to dissolve rocks as a weapon against life.

When Bernie Sanders talks about democratic socialism, he is talking about improving upon the social programs that have been developed over the past 85 years. Then when conservatives attack him, they instill fear of government taking over businesses, as if the bureaucrats were going to replace McDonalds in selling hamburgers. Some governments did try to get heavily involved in business enterprises but largely failed, and no one is talking about anything resembling it in the western world. Even China is only subsidizing businesses rather than owning them.

Oppressors try to corrupt and destroy basic social services, because they assume they can get by without them easier than the lower classes can. So they gut education, police work and infrastructure. They call the result "austerity." It means, make government work without resources.

But corrupters must speak in opposites to justify what is not justifiable. So they pretend to be improving economies and government by gutting economies. They pretend to be lowering taxes while they burn tax dollars which must be replaced later. Look what they did in Argentina. They took a thriving economy created by a liberal administration claiming it needed fixing. They did an IMF type of austerity fix and bankrupted everything.

In the U.S., conservatives ran an election harping on the infrastructure that needed fixing. After getting elected they did nothing on infrastructure. Conservatives do not want infrastructure to function, because they assume only the lower classes depend upon it. The elites do not use highways, they use airplanes. So they allow roads and bridges to deteriorate for the lower classes.