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To me, even that rudimentary cause-and-effect thought (if I shout the right slogans, covid will go away) would be comforting because it would mean that there's at least some thinking going on. But my uncomfortable, reluctant suspicion is that a sizeable minority (at least?) don't even engage at that level. They're simply not engaging at all.
I think we all actually kind of do this sort of thing in certain situations. I know nothing about sports other than what I've gleaned from others' conversations and watching my dad yell at the TV growing up. That said I can still make comments in a casual conversation along the lines of "Yep, that's our $NFL_TEAM, choking at the 1 yard line, as is tradition, haha." When I say that, I'm really just making mouth noises that convey "We are similar! I wish to be friendly!" I'm communicating zero information about my opinions or thoughts on sports, even though it might seem otherwise. I'm not actually engaging my brain at all.
Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.
It may be just an issue of abstracting. Politics, beyond the very simple, involves a lot of abstractions, and the capacity or interest of many people to handle more than a few simple abstractions at the same time (as in doing short multiplication or division) seems limited. As David Stove put it when defending positivism against the criticism that it robs life of the spiritual and transcendent wonders of religion and philosophy:
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