Turns Out They Weren't All That Concerned With Academic Support

From Jonathan Chait's, "The Arguments of the Great Recession Are Over. Hooray.":

"Academic support for that position has almost entirely collapsed. I don’t even see many conservative intellectuals defending it in columns. And yet the Republican Party marches on, opposing any effort to lift short-term austerity policies that economists almost all believe are holding back the recovery. It’s as if the head of the austerity monster has been sliced off, but the body lurches forward regardless."

Why should this come as any surprise? We're talking about the party that has set itself forward as opposed to the "reality-based community". What use have they for we who "believe that solutions emerge from ... judicious study of discernible reality" when our reality conflicts with their ideology?