There are two warring insider narratives in Washington right now over what Republicans really want in the negotiations over the debt limit. One is that the content of any deal is less important than how it is framed politically. The other is that the GOP is just driving a really hard bargain in order to gain maximal policy concessions. But there’s a third and largely overlooked phenomenon that’s gumming up the works of any possible deal: the growing number of conservatives who genuinely believe that they (and the country) would be better off without one.

Under the first narrative proffered by insiders, any debt ceiling deal that could be interpreted as making Barack Obama’s re-election more likely is intolerable. This is supposedly the rationale for Mitch McConnell’s proposal last week, which backed off earlier Republican demands for spending cuts and instead created a series of pre-election hurdles intended to make the president look bad. The second narrative, on the other hand, is that the GOP’s hard-line opposition to a compromise on the debt limit is largely tactical. The deliberate and cynical deployment of hard-core Tea Party activists is simply intended to increase the leverage of GOP negotiators by creating the appearance their hands are tied. This tactic will work, many predict, because of either the (take your pick) sense of responsibility or gutlessness of the White House and congressional Democratic leaders.

Both these theories, however, imply that the GOP will accept the best deal they can get at the last possible moment. That means there’s no reason to take seriously the large and growing number of conservatives inside and beyond Washington who are shouting ‘No Deal At All.’ It’s the latest version of the ancient Beltway Establishment belief that Republicans are a party led by adults, whose noisy, bad children will, in the end, bite their lips and shuffle off to their rooms at bedtime as commanded. That may yet turn out to be true, if only because the injunction of Republican elders to conservative activists to behave on the debt limit will be backed up by the paymasters of Wall Street. But I wouldn’t be so sure.

To begin, a large number of conservative activists and Republican pols have been lashing themselves to the mast of intransigence on the debt ceiling issue like Odysseus sailing into the land of the Sirens. They include those who have convinced themselves that a failure to raise the debt limit will not actually produce a default on debts, as well as those who read the polls and decided there was no advantage to be gained in defying both the Tea Party Movement and long-standing public opposition to any and all debt limit increases. But they also include the nine presidential candidates (ten if Rick Perry runs), 12 Senators, 39 House members, five governors, and 183 conservative organizations that have signed the Cut, Cap, and Balance Pledge opposing any debt limit increase if it is not accompanied by all three prongs of that politically impossible proposal. The chief engineer of this pledge, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, is an extraordinarily powerful figure these days, both in Washington and on the 2012 campaign trail, thanks to his home state’s pivotal position in the GOP presidential primary.

Moreover, the power of the “just say no” faction extends beyond the ranks of actual Pledge signatories to all those Republican officeholders who do not wish to expose themselves to Tea Party wrath or primary challenges. This faction’s ultimate position was well articulated yesterday by RedState proprietor and ideological commissar Erick Erickson: