The Center Holding?

So the government is back.  Huzzah.
I read the summation of the end of the latest shutdown this morning: absent the House of Representatives actually doing their job, the Senate did an end run around the increasingly splintered GOP and got a resolution approved by the Democrats and enough Republicans who were tired of being in the same boat as Ted Cruz.  The Washington Post published an article about how the conservative factions, who had been doing a lot of chest thumping about their ability to stall the entire empire, were sort of glum this morning.  They had played hardball against the Democrats.  They suspected that those bleeding heart liberals were just too soft to stand up to them, they were wrong.  They lost.  And it may be a sign of things to come.
Democracy works, eventually.  Yeats and Walker Percy have both said, "The Center Cannot hold," and that often has the ring of ominous truth, but the center usually does hold.  It's not always pretty, and sometimes things seem pretty grim, and then you wake up one morning and guess what?  It held.
In the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, where he says the center cannot hold, he also says, "The best lack conviction and the worst work with passionate intensity."  You find passionate intensity on both extremes.  Extreme radicals and extreme fundamentalists both have incredible intensity, and the moderates seem phlegmatic to the point of being lugubrious (I like words, get a dictionary).
So here we are.  The vocal minority has been defeated by the silent majority, because they finally pushed the moderates too far.  They committed political suicide because they thought they were in the right.  It may seem that the Democrats and moderate Republicans all of the sudden grew a backbone, but the fact of the matter is that it was there all along.  They knew something, which was perhaps invisible to the right-wing zealots, the American people are, in the vast majority, a compassionate, reasonable bunch.  Most of us actually want to see the government function to protect the vulnerable and put some restraints on the worst demons of human nature.  Unchecked greed is not an American virtue and is in fact not a requirement for a free market economy.
Those that, perhaps out of left over Cold War sentiments, or simple dogmatic thickness, think that laissez-faire is still a good idea, after over a century of abuse by the robber barons of the world (whether they are Andrew Carnegie or Bernie Madoff), are trying to defend a vacant citadel.  Most of the world has moved past the conflict between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and have found that there is something besides an apocalyptic wasteland.  But there are some who still want to fight that battle, some for whom communism is still the "ism" of the "evil empire," even though the actual empire part went poof around 1989.  Capitalism has proven it's flaws as well, and maybe (though this is a moment of uncharacteristic and probably unfounded optimism): we can finally structure our society in a way that is not beholden to a rigid ideology, but in a way that makes the most sense for the people of our nation.
Oh wait... we're going to have to go through all of this again in three months.
Turning and turning the widening gyre.