Why doesn't descriptive complexity theory solve P = NP?
Note the difference between second-order logic, and existential second order logic. Full logic is much more powerful than existential logic.

Also, it's important not to underestimate the power of a least-fixed point operator. Linearly-ordered first order logic is likely far less powerful than the version with fixed-points.

In short, we know that vanilla first-order logic is weaker than vanilla second-order logic, but we don't know that linearly-ordered first order logic with a least-fixed point operator is weaker than the existential fragment of second order logic.