Paul Krugman hasn't quite spelled it out yet, but with post after post he has constructed a very strong argument in favor of the conclusion that the GOP is not made up of "Conservatives". Instead, a far better name would be "Reaganists" because virtually all of their views were part of President Reagan's political message and the rest are from other sources during the same era.
The single biggest problem? Pretty much every part of this world view has Many of the ideas were plausible back in 1981. But in 2014 we can now see that pretty much every part of the Reaganist world view has turn out to be empirically false.
In this post, Krugman examines the false theories that Reaganists use to understand the problem of poverty: