It needs to earn back its credibility on that subject.

Some Republicans, like Chris Christie, are taking pains to seem as if they are competent pragmatists. That's always an easier task for governors than legislators, but when the legislators behave as Tea Party Republicans have in recent weeks, they do damage to their prospects for accruing influence or elevating members. I wouldn't want Tea Party legislators to betray their ideals or their consciences to appear more sober, but enabling the United States to pay its bills and keep its government running is hardly a betrayal of anyone's principles!

The good news for the Tea Party is that, presuming the debt ceiling is soon raised and the government ultimately reopened, this whole episode will likely matter less than you'd think from coverage in the political press. As Nate Silver notes, "Remember Syria? The fiscal cliff? Benghazi? The IRS scandal? The collapse of immigration reform? All of these were hyped as game-changing political moments by the news media, just as so many stories were during the election last year. In each case, the public's interest quickly waned once the news cycle turned over to another story. Most political stories have a fairly short half-life and won't turn out to be as consequential as they seem at the time."

Perhaps Tea Party politicians will extricate themselves from this situation and suffer only marginally. But if they're ever to affect the United States more than Barry Goldwater did, they'd better figure out that voters are risk averse and won't elevate pols who seem like they might blow up the system if they don't get all they want. As Tea Partiers engage in a high-stakes standoff for the sake of concessions that would do little to advance their ideological project, they seem like people who might blow up the system if they don't get everything they want.

The Tea Party ought to be able to do better. "Rand Paul is more in touch with the public mood on national security issues than a lot of G.O.P. foreign policy hands, Mike Lee has a better tax plan than any of his fellow Republican senators, Heritage Action is absolutely right about farm subsidies and the House G.O.P. leadership is wrong … I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating: If you’re looking for policy innovation on the right, the populist wing is mostly where the action is," Ross Douthat correctly observes. "And yet none of this matters right now, because the current populist strategy isn’t going to work, isn’t going to make the populist’s ideas or the Republican Party more popular, and has marched the entire party into a cul-de-sac from which, it seems, only the uncourageous dealmaking K Street-friendly leadership types can rescue it."

Pursuing a liberty-minded, small-government agenda need not involve reckless standoffs that risk America's credit, but you'd never know that from the last few weeks. It's frustrating as hell for those of us hungering for a credible Republican alternative to K Street, warmongering, and a liberty-destroying national-security state.

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*They're all drug warriors too.