Today, Businessweek’s Peter Coy argued that the self-described “underdog” Tea Party had won the fiscal war long before the shutdown battle had even begun. In his piece, “The Tea Party’s Pyrrhic Victory,” Coy claims,

Ronald Reagan had nothing on today’s Tea Party when it comes to shrinking the parts of government that require annual appropriations by Congress.

His argument, since winning the House in 2010, conservatives have quietly won victory after victory:

Obamacare aside, events have actually gone the movement’s way ever since Republicans wrested control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. Discretionary spending has been falling. Federal-employee head count is down. And since 2010, deficit reduction has been more rapid than in any three-year period since the demobilization following World War II.

Discretionary spending (i.e., spending excluding transfer payments and interest) will fall even more in the decades ahead if the laws that the Tea Party helped get on the books stay there. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current law, by 2038 total spending on everything other than the major health-care programs, Social Security, and interest will decline to the smallest share of the economy since the 1930s.

Of course, don’t expect the mainstream media to tout those accomplishments. Instead, we’ll be getting a lot of football spiking in the coming days and weeks over the epic big government victory. And the Tea Party will continue to be deemed the big losers.

But Coy doesn’t seem to expect the Tea Party to be slinking away anytime soon:

Say this for Tea Party Republicans: They don’t back down. No apologies for triggering a partial shutdown of the federal government, then refusing to raise the debt ceiling without concessions. Condemnation rains down on them from the White House, from foreign capitals, from public opinion polls, but the Tea Party rages on.