Nothing to do with ideology, but with the nature of the field. Take epidemiological research in the areas of food and medicine: incredibly hard and expensive to get right and even then with often tenuous results. Now try doing that with ridiculously heterogeneous nations influenced by potentially almost everything on the planet.

It's a small miracle that economists manage to get some useful insights out of the data, but we should definitely be aware of how weakly most of them are supported (don't start talking about "error bars" with economists).

Tbf, most americans just sort of skate along on vibes and don't have many concrete values or material understanding of our society at all, regardless of how they identify.

Cf any argument over rent control: people either want it out of some sort of justice for inhumanely priced rents, or people bought into some kind of idea that it doesn't work because some think tank they put faith in pushed that messaging. Few people actually study the literally thousands of ways that almost every other society manages to house their population more effectively. It's all just vibes.

I mention calculus specifically because it does feel like more of the progressive movements in economics are focused on rate of change rather than point in time. I personally often tend to get into electrical circuit analogies that current/resistance/impedance are more useful than steady state voltage. I find I especially bring these metaphors up a lot when discussing cryptocurrencies (and why I distrust them: inflation/deflation is the wrong axis, in my opinion, some inflation is a useful sign of "impedance" in the circuit, the trick to a healthy economy is not "deflationary" [most of real world history states that the deflationary economies are the worst to live in] but carefully managing the rate of change of inflation).

That progressive science of economics is happening, slowly (this paper seems relevant), but so much of conservative discussions get trapped in (misreads of) Adam Smith still. From a progressive point of view it does seem easy to dismiss conservative views of economics as bunk pseudoscience if they begin and nearly always end with Adam Smith, ignore some of Adam Smith's own warnings (for instance, relevant to above conversation: Adam Smith was also often the first to admit that the "free market" is an ideal/a model and unlikely to ever be a reality because humans are messy and ultimately irrational as individuals), and also ignore centuries worth of work since then, especially a lot of the "pre-calculus" stuff.