I haven't yet had a chance to go back through the positions of "conservative" parties throughout history to answer the question: Is it typical of conservative or right-wing political groups to be ideologically committed to propositions that are empirically false?
In the meantime, my working hypothesis is that conservatism normally is more about process than substance, and, therefore, is not always marked by the commitment to wrongness that characterizes the GOP circa 2014. If this hypothesis is correct, it supports the argument that most of what the mainstream American media calls "conservative" should be relabeled as "Reaganism".
Then the question becomes: what are the roots of the wrongness of Reaganism? An early suspect has to be MIlton Friedman and "Freshwater Economics". We know Friedman's ideas had a powerful effect on the Reagan administration and we also know they were wrong.
This recent Krugman post looks at a specific example of that wrongness, the battle between pragmatic Keynesians and the beautiful math produced by the Chicago Boys on the subject of falling wages during a recession.