Earlier this week, the Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart argued that despite the dominate media narrative over the Republicans’ shutdown “surrender,” the ideological influence of the GOP has actually increased since 2010. And that subversive narrative is slowly picking up steam.

In his article Monday, Beinart sees both the fiscal and ideological long-game going conservative’s way, pointing to a number of the administration’s agenda failures:

If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory.

It’s not just that Obama looks likely to accept the sequester cuts as the basis for future budget negotiations. It’s that while he’s been trying to reopen the government and prevent a debt default, his chances of passing any significant progressive legislation have receded. Despite overwhelming public support, gun control is dead.

Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama’s second term agenda, looks unlikely. And the other items Obama trumpeted in this year’s state of the union address—climate change legislation, infrastructure investment, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost to the minimum wage—have been largely forgotten.

And Beinart is not the only one who sees things this way. On Thursday, Businessweek’s Peter Coy argued that the supposedly impotent Tea Party had won the fiscal war long before the shutdown battle had even begun, claiming,

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

Just this morning, the National Journal's Michael Hirsch essentially echoed Beinart and Coy:

When it comes to policy, it is still the Republicans—that is, the tea party, the GOP's new beating heart—who are still largely setting the agenda. 

Online media momentum is one thing, but don't hold your breath for this narrative to get much airtime on the evening news.