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I'm not sure that's true. Even if it is, anti-circumcision activism is much less hopeless than it was 50 years ago.
Well first of all, not everybody on TheMotte considers themselves a rationalist or has a background in the rationalist community. Personally, while I enjoy and have learned from some rationalist writings, I do not consider myself a part of the rationalist movement.
Second, while TheMotte largely agrees with your policy preferences, the rationalist community as a whole does not. It is not surprising that a movement that is not dominated by people who agree with your policy preferences is not winning at enacting policies that you prefer.
Third, even if the rationalist community was dominated by people who agree with your policy preferences, it is not clear that rationalists are particularly good at getting policy changed. I think that the rationalist movement has definitely had some effect on politics. It has, for example, produced a few quite good writers who have convinced a pretty large number of people to either change their minds about certain things or to speak more openly about what they already believed. But the effect has been limited. I think one reason for that, even putting aside the question of whether rationalists are actually any smarter or more rational than the average politician, is that most rationalists are not the kind of personality types who crave power and are willing to do what it takes to get it.
Yudkowsky wrote that "Rationality is Systematized Winning", one of the few things written by him I've ever even glanced at so far, and it seems to me that even there he pointed out that it is irrational to act as if being a nerdy hyper-verbal person who cares about truth is going to magically give you political power.
But rationalism attracts people who care more about being nerdy hyper-verbal people who care about truth than about gaining brute power through hook or crook, and it's far from clear that rationalism is actually more rational than competing movements, so I'm not surprised that rationalism is not dominating politics.
I would also like to point out that, even if rationalism does not win as much as you would like, it's quite possible that in the absence of rationalism, your preferred politics would win even less.
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