The brilliant New Republic writer Jonathan Chait has spent years torturing conservatives (and himself) by compiling and analyzing the contradictions between conservative ideology and factual evidence. Unlike center-left opinion journalists, which generally bow toward Brookings-style empirical analysis, conservative intellectuals have been resolutely anti-empiricist in supporting supply-side economists (which economists shun), missile defense (questioned by physicists), and the like.

Indeed, you can generally track the fortunes of empiricism on the right by reading Chait’s writing over the last decade, and the news has generally not been good (as All the President’s Spin also concludes). But there have been a few encouraging signs recently — consider three incidents Chait has documented:

1) He claimed in 2003 that the prescription drug bill was skewed to the interests of business. National Review’s David Frum mocked Chait at the time, but on May 1 of this year, Frum conceded that “Republicans worked a lot harder to ensure that the prescription drug benefit relieved businesses of the burden of their past prescription drug promises than to protect taxpayers.”

2) Chait argued last year that conservatives support smaller government as an end in itself, rather than as a means to achieve some policy goal. As a result, he claims, conservative policy beliefs are therefore less susceptible to empirical disconfirmation than those of liberals, who don’t support big government as a goal, but as a means to achieve various empirically measured policy goals. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg freaked out at the time, but then made a similar point in a May 25 post on the National Review blog.

3) Chait praised three conservatives for making falsifiable predictions about liberal media bias and then admitting that they all failed to come true, though none of them reconsidered their theories.

All of these are at least somewhat encouraging, right? But then I read Chait’s latest article in TNR, which perfectly documents how right-wingers excommunicate conservative leaders once they become unpopular, as they are doing now to President Bush. No matter what the evidence indicates, the leaders’ failure is attributed to their insufficient fidelity to the conservative program. As Chait sums it up, “[t]he liberal author Rick Pearlstein once said of the right’s mindset, ‘Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.’ Bush has failed. Therefore, he cannot be a conservative.” This kind of “analysis,” which liberals frequently engage in as well, is essentially theological. Every political failure is attributed to compromise, moderation, or other signs of impurity.

So now I’m depressed again. Can’t we all just be one reality-based community?