Do you have to be smart to care? I don’t know. People who are are really dumb (IQs below a certain threshold such as 80 or so), don’t. But many really smart people care a lot about social issues. Contrary to the liberal media archetype of the low-IQ troglodyte conservative, in order to care greatly about issues requires a certain degree of intellect (again, how much, I don’t know, but many ‘culture warriors’ on the right are very smart). To care about an issue that does not affect one’s immediate surroundings or senses requires that one rationalize that it is important. In contrast to the temporal world of empiricism, rationalism exists only within the confines of the mind. Therefore, people who are feeble-minded aren’t as good at making rationalizations as those who are smart. They cannot rationalize something that is non-immediate, abstract, or distant as being important or true.
As for myself, I have stopped caring as much as I used to, due to the non-existent progress on important issues, but also lack of follow-through. Scott Adams can keep putting out periscopes and Vox Day can keep calling him ‘god emperor’ [if by ‘god’ he means Cupid, the weakest of the gods, in contrast to Mars], but the scorecard is clearly in the left’s favor. The problem, as I have said on the blog many times, is the lack of follow-through. Tweeting one or twice about tech censorship, drug prices, or Amazon is not going to have any affect. It has to be done over and over. Advertisers know that for a message to stick it has to be repeated. That’s why the ‘build the wall’ meme was so successful, because he kept repeating it during the campaign. If Trump tweeted about Google and Amazon frequently, even without any policy , it would have an accumulative effect than just doing it once or twice, in which it is easily forgotten and effectively useless.