It's not capitalism that's gone off the rails ... it's socialism. All of the countries with slow growth and growing inequality have heavy-handed socialist policies in place.
I don't accept this premise. Voting is only a small input into the colossal self-propelling machinery of bureaucracy (and the government-to-corporations-and-back chain of what could be called pay-offs or bribes... ie campaign donations, to profit-increasing changes in government policy, and back again).
So howsabout this rephrasing:
> people who through [their free actions] can shape their societies as they see fit...
1) I don't necessarily agree with your claim "through democratic institutions can shape their societies as they see it" - democracies are quite a bit messier than that.
2) I wouldn't use the word "converging" - I would probably say becoming stuck in similar states of sub-optimal social organisation.
And to touch on your other suggestions, I would say that, while these are certainly the richest and most educated people in the world, I don't believe that they are as a whole either: a) particularly self-aware of their own desires and values b) particularly conscious of how they might achieve said desires and values or c) particularly cognisant of how contemporary norm of policies and political strategies actually affect and shape society.
My argument would be that if people satisfied a, b, and c, we would see very different policy arrangements in Western societies. Speaking crudely, people would accept that even if it were possible to coerce market outcomes, it would not be desirable. Politics would become extremely boring, because it would no longer hold pretensions about its capacity to "manage" or "shape" the market.
I would assert that these are the policies that an enlightened society would recognise as most contributing and enabling the greatest good to the greatest number, and would therefore pursue.
Fundamentally, I don't think modern societies are as enlightened as you would like to portray them. That's really not meant to be a critique, I don't think it would be fair to expect much more at this stage of history.
Let us defend the right of one another to the freedom to act as we each see fit, as long as we do not cause each other harm.
Note that this is still a world in which many people can and most certainly will make poor decisions and fall behind in life. But there is nothing stopping a true libertarian from feeling that some of their time and resources can be best spent helping those people improve their economic decision-making.
Yet a true libertarian would also honour the decision of another not to care (though they might not respect it.)
> All of the countries [have] growing inequality [and] heavy-handed socialist policies in place.
Meanwhile, most of Europe has seen zero GDP growth in real terms since 2004/05. France has seen an average of sub 1% nominal GDP growth for a decade; negative in real terms. Japan, which is a massive welfare state, has seen zero GDP growth for 20 years; their State spending dug such a deep hole, a quarter of their revenues go to just paying interest on debt, and they've taken to debasing their currency as the last step available to them to hold off further collapse. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, et al. are welfare state disasters, rapidly imploding. The US has seen zero standard of living improvement for 40 years, and that's before accounting for the massive increase in debt that has yet to exact its full toll.
You can count the number of welfare states in the world that are doing well on one hand, with one of them being a temporary oil empire named Norway.
We shouldn't measure how well the kingdom is doing by the gloss of the marbles at the king's court.
Hong Kong and Singapore had an astounding growth of 2.9% and 3.9%, while socialist China had a miserable 7.7%? I don't get the impression you looked at the numbers at all, or did you?
(BTW: China sure has a market economy, but OTOH it lacks multiple specifics of contemporary Western capitalist economies, e.g. it's not primarily driven by the financial markets, a significant portion of the workforce still works at state owned enterprises, much deeper planned macro economical development than in the West, ...)
I don't know about Singapore, but the last echo I had about Honk Kong was "we have too many poor people, you can't seriously consider letting them vote".