It is a major difference though, since they could do something if there's some large issue. In a republic, the person with that power is also the person usuall

It is a major difference though, since they could do something if there's some large issue. In a republic, the person with that power is also the person usually making the decisions, so when those decisions are bad, there isn't another party with the power to stop them. In Canada at least(Canadian here) the Governor general does step in at times to prorogue or dismiss the government. Socialism lost all proper meaning in the McCarthy era, but Canada and Sweden are specifically not capitalism in the way that capitalists say free markets are always better. The US is more capitalists than both those countries, and is worse off for it. Certainly if you consider it hotly debated, you can't say that capitalist republicanism is the least bad, since alternatives are equivalent