HERE’S the good news for Republicans: The party now has a faction committed to learning real lessons from the 2012 defeat, breaking with the right’s stale policy consensus and embracing new ideas on a range of issues, from foreign policy to middle-class taxes, the drug war to banking reform.

Here’s the bad news for Republicans: The party also has a faction committed to a reckless, pointless budget brinkmanship, which creates a perpetual cycle of outrage and disillusionment among conservatives and leaves Washington lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next.

Here’s the strange news for Republicans: These two factions are actually one and the same.

The media tend to assume that moderation and reform are essentially synonymous. But ever since Mitt Romney lost last November, most of the genuine policy innovation on the right has come from the party’s populist, Tea Party-affiliated wing. The key figure has been Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose antiwar conservatism has kicked off a post-Iraq foreign policy debate that the party desperately needed, and whose forays into issues like sentencing reform and drug policy have raised the possibility of a national Republican Party that’s smart as well as tough on crime.

But it hasn’t just been Paul turning populism into policy. This spring, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, nobody’s idea of a moderate, became the Republican face of a financial reform effort aimed at addressing the problem of “too big to fail” banks. And then just last week, Paul’s frequent ally Mike Lee, the junior senator from Utah, took the floor at the American Enterprise Institute to offer a tax-reform proposal that would actually help middle-class families rather than mostly cut taxes on the investor class.