Pema Levy is a Washington correspondent for Newsweek.

Machiavelli’s famous advice to politicians is that it is better to be feared than loved. Less often quoted is an equally valuable admonition: avoid being hated.

Jim DeMint, the former senator-turned-Tea Party leader at the helm of the Heritage Foundation, never tried to win the love of the Republican establishment. He did, however, succeed over the past several years, first as the junior senator from South Carolina and since last year, as head of the GOP’s most prominent think tank, at being feared by his fellow Republicans. But now he finds himself in the position of being merely despised.


Just a few months ago, headlines declared DeMint the “shadow speaker” who “pulls the strings” in Washington, and he was credited with almost singlehandedly grinding Washington to a halt. (Including by DeMint, who boasted that he had “more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator.”) The real House speaker, Ohio’s John Boehner, couldn’t stop the government shutdown that DeMint and Tea Party groups orchestrated and cheered when they convinced a majority of House Republicans to go along with their defund-Obamacare-or-else strategy last October.

That was then. But ask around Washington now, and you’ll hear that while DeMint is undoubtedly still a Republican power broker (and a high-profile one at that, whose new book, a gauzy tribute to the USA called Falling in Love with America Again, comes out Tuesday just in time for some election-year proselytizing), he no longer strikes fear in establishment Republican hearts. As GOP consultant John Feehery, a veteran Capitol Hill aide who worked for the Republican House leadership, put it, “I don’t go to bed thinking about Jim DeMint.”

“There was a time when Jim DeMint was one of the most feared people on the Republican side,” former Rep. Steve LaTourette, a friend and political ally of the speaker’s, told me. “I don’t think he’s a factor anymore.”

Then again, his newfound irrelevance is a byproduct of his success.

***

It used to be that starry-eyed new lawmakers arrived in Washington ready to suck up to party leaders, pay their dues, then move up the ranks. Not Jim DeMint. After getting his MBA from Clemson University, DeMint started his own research and marketing firm in Greenville, South Carolina. He got interested in politics after helping a fellow South Carolinian win a congressional seat in 1992. By the time he was elected to the House in 1998, before ascending to the Senate in 2005, DeMint’s politics had grown increasingly conservative.

Many of his GOP colleagues saw his anti-government proposals as politically infeasible and his tactics too confrontational. DeMint wrote legislation to shut down the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Agency. He drafted a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on his fellow members of Congress. He also pushed to term-limit Republican leaders and appropriators’ positions in the Senate, setting up a confrontation he lost badly. And even when he did succeed—in his crusade to ban earmarks, for instance—he butted heads with the Republican leaders who depended on them to dole out favors in the Capitol’s old you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours way of doing business.

When DeMint realized just how opposed his fellow Republicans were to his agenda, he turned his energies to changing the Senate itself. In 2008 he started a political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, now run by his former chief of staff, Matt Hoskins, to support ultra-conservative candidates in Republican primaries. SCF angered DeMint’s colleagues by supporting upstart Tea Party candidates over Republican incumbents. (The group, no longer run directly by DeMint, has gone even more confrontational this year by supporting a Republican primary challenger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.)

On Nov. 2, 2010, many of DeMint’s picks rode the Tea Party wave into Congress—Florida’s Marco Rubio, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and Kentucky’s Rand Paul quickly became high-profile players in the GOP.

But some of DeMint’s chosen did not make it. Christine O’Donnell of Delaware bumped a moderate Republican out of the primary, then went down in history as the woman who stared into a camera and said, “I’m not a witch.” DeMint’s picks in Nevada and Colorado proved similarly unelectable.

In the end, DeMint made the caucus more conservative, but he also helped keep it in the minority. “I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters,” he declared.

That was four years ago, but every single Republican interviewed for this article mentioned the line. DeMint made the mistake of saying out loud he’d rather choose ideological purity over winning in a town that worships winners. And no, his fellow Republicans have not gotten over it.

“That’s a great soundbite, except it means you will lose every issue every day of the week. You have absolutely no power with only 30 senators,” said Republican consultant Brian Walsh, who spent the 2010 and 2012 cycles working to elect a Republican Senate majority at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

***

DeMint’s approach didn’t earn the affection of the Republican establishment, but it did help move the Senate GOP caucus to the right. By the time he resigned his seat in January 2013 to take over at Heritage, he left a Senate he had helped shape.

Founded 41 years ago, the Heritage Foundation for decades combined policy work with more Capitol Hill savvy than other think tanks, churning out timely issue primers that made their way to lawmakers’ desks. The group’s stature may have faded somewhat from its apex in the Reagan years, when its wonkish, free-market ideas regularly were translated into White House policy, but when DeMint came on board, he took a hefty pay raise—we know his predecessor, Ed Feulner, made more than $1 million per year—and set about trying to rebuild the group’s influence in Washington.

In a way, DeMint was already helping remake Heritage, even before he took the job. In 2010, the think tank had launched Heritage Action for America—a 501(c)(4) lobbying arm—to push its agenda directly on Capitol Hill. Its chief operating officer, Tim Chapman, who along with CEO Michael Needham helped conceive of and now run the lobbying arm, cut his teeth as an aide for DeMint.

Heritage Action and other conservative groups like the Koch brothers-affiliated Americans for Prosperity borrowed a tactic from the National Rifle Association, which famously rates politicians from A to F, and began using scorecards to grade lawmakers. If a lawmaker crosses Heritage Action on a “key vote”—which can include anything from backing the recent Ryan-Murray budget deal to an amendment on flood insurance—their score goes down. (The latest scorecards for the 113th Congress show that Heritage Action has scored 31 House votes thus far and 38 Senate votes. And with scoring comes the deluge: Heritage Action and other groups use district-level digital advertising to pressure Republicans and encourage their grassroots followers to flood lawmakers with calls and emails ahead of votes.)

But by the restive summer and fall of 2013, Heritage’s demands became too much for a majority of the Republican caucus. Even very conservative Republicans felt betrayed over the summer when they followed Heritage Action’s recommendation to break the Farm Bill in two, one bill for agriculture subsidies and one for food stamps, only to be told that a vote for the new version without food stamps would be scored against them. “We went into battle thinking they were on our side, and we find out they’re shooting at us,” conservative Rep. Mick Mulvaney, of South Carolina, told the Wall Street Journal last July.

The Heritage Foundation’s cozy relationship with House Republicans began to break down and the chair of the Republican Study Committee, a group of the most conservative Republicans started decades ago with Heritage’s help, ousted the foundation’s staffers from the group’s meetings. As the New York Times put it, “as Heritage Action became more aggressive, study committee members demanded to know why the people criticizing them in their districts were listening in on their strategizing in Washington. ”

Then came the shutdown. It was clear that Heritage had the ear of the Republican conference, but it cost Republicans dearly in the court of public opinion. DeMint rallied the grassroots behind the shutdown strategy, traveling to nine different cities last summer, where he told voters that the budget was conservatives’ last chance to stop Obamacare.

The deal to end the shutdown precipitated budget negotiations and in December, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a darling of the right, ironed out a bipartisan budget compromise along with his counterpart in the Senate. At last, a truce had been called to America’s years of budget crisis.

When Heritage Action and other groups urged Republicans to vote against the deal, Speaker Boehner said enough is enough. “Frankly, I think they’re misleading their followers,” Boehner said. “I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be. And frankly, I just think that they’ve lost all credibility.”

Hours later, the budget deal cleared the House by a huge margin. Boehner had taken the reins back. It was a huge setback for DeMint, the most public face of the Tea Party vs. establishment battle.

“I think that they have gone a bridge too far,” said LaTourette, a moderate who now runs the Republican Main Street Partnership, a policy shop that associates itself with the “governing wing of the Republican Party.” “The speaker of the House says you have no credibility, that’s not a small thing.”

The vote tallies also tell a story of DeMint’s influence—and that of outside Tea Party groups generally—breaking down. Last October, for example, only 87 House Republicans voted to end the shutdown while, at DeMint’s urging, 144 voted to keep the government closed. But two months later, Republicans voted to pass a bipartisan budget deal opposed by Heritage Action and outside groups with 169 yes votes and just 62 nos.

DeMint decried the budget in a blog post that same day: “Country singer Aaron Tippin’s old hit song ‘You’ve Got to Stand for Something (or You’ll Fall For Anything)’ could be the new theme song for the Republican leadership in the U.S. House,” he wrote. It passed anyways.

After the budget, the House approved a bipartisan Farm Bill compromise by nearly the same margin, 162 Republicans for and 63 against. In February, the House raised the debt ceiling with no strings attached over the protestations of DeMint and other Tea Party agitators. A few days after the vote, DeMint said on CBS’s Face the Nation that Republican leadership had raised the debt ceiling because it had “figured out either they give the president all the money and debt he wants, or he’s going to close the government down and blame it on them.” DeMint and Heritage were quieter on this vote than they had been in months, potentially a sign that they were picking their battles, though they did score the vote. It was as if establishment Republicans weren’t afraid of DeMint and his ilk anymore.

“I think it was a big blow to DeMint,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said of Boehner’s outburst. “And in some ways it was a learning moment for DeMint. Whether he recaptures that previous influence is up to him and that means sort of picking and choosing his battles.”

But that influence might be hard to restore, given the toll DeMint’s activism has taken on the reputation of what was long Heritage’s core asset: its research.

“If you’re a think tank, the way it should work is you formulate ideas and then you cultivate allies on Capitol Hill to help advance those ideas,” said Walsh, the GOP consultant, who publicly scolded DeMint and Tea Party groups over their shutdown strategy this past summer. “When you’re attacking those allies instead of working with them, that’s not helpful.”

But cozying up to other Republicans was never DeMint’s style. While DeMint still holds enormous sway over the most conservative lawmakers, more moderate Republicans said over and over in interviews that a think tank is only as good as its credibility, and a think-tank president is only as powerful as the institution he runs. And Heritage has lost a lot of credibility.

“I think Jim is making them more political,” said Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Boehner ally who is currently fending off a Tea Party challenger. “Since they’ve become political, got the Heritage Action wing of their party, I think it’s hurt their foundation aspect of it, and that’s too bad because they really were a good source.”

“I used to use Heritage Foundation when I first got elected for their white papers on issues that I didn’t have much exposure to,” said Florida Rep. Tom Rooney. But since Heritage Action and other outside groups began scoring votes, Rooney says, he’s stopped paying attention to them. By ignoring Heritage and the others, “it’s allowed me to have a lot more peace of mind, to focus on my constituents rather than what everybody else thinks.”

Republicans have come up with clever turns of phrase to describe Heritage’s evolution. “Heritage used to be this place where Republicans got ideas, now it’s a place where they get attacked,” said Feehery. “[It’s] focused less on conservatism and more on contrarianism,” said Walsh. Many told me they believe under DeMint, Heritage is most effective at attacking its own, pressuring Republicans to take votes that cost the party politically (one strategist referred to the government shutdown as “Pickett’s charge.”)

“[DeMint’s] moved it more in the political direction than the policy direction,” said O’Connell. “If he moves it too far, he could be—how should I say it?—killing his own golden goose.”

“Heritage Action is getting the boom it’s getting because it’s got ‘Heritage’ in front of ‘Action,’” he continued. “If Heritage is weakened too much, there is no Action.”

***

DeMint shows little sign of remorse. “I ruffled some feathers, too, when I was in the Senate … That’s a big part of what Action is supposed to do. It’s what we call tough love, I guess,” DeMint told the New York Times recently.

He sees Heritage’s work this year as in keeping with the group’s goals. “If you study the history of Heritage you will find that from the start it has sought to be a policy institution that influences the policy making debate,” he told me through a spokesperson. “The creation of Heritage Action added an important new dimension to what Heritage has done for decades. Heritage Action holds politicians accountable, something the Foundation itself cannot do.”

“Do politicians like it? Some probably do not, but that reveals more about them than it does Heritage or Heritage Action.”

The disdain is mutual.

“They’re the ones who—it just seems to me that they are running a campaign to really screw Republicans,” said Feehery, referring to Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund. “I find them to be—it’s treacherous what they’re doing to the Republican Party.”

As for DeMint? He’s “annoying,” Feehery conceded. But he’s really not much more than that.