In Response to: James Madison’s “Rejoin. Or Die.”

Dear Mr. Madison,

I have read your essay four times now. I keep returning to the line about safeguards that do not fail because they are overpowered but because those charged with operating them simply stop. I have highlighted it. I have sent it to friends. I have read it aloud to my husband over dinner, and he put down his fork and said, “That is exactly what has happened.”

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Catherine Hargrove, and I am what my children have taken to calling a Blue Republican. The color, they explain to me patiently, is meant to suggest loyalty; not to a man or a movement, but to the actual principles the Republican Party once claimed to stand for. I prefer the term, frankly, to the alternatives. I am not a RINO, because I am not Republican In Name Only. I am a Republican in substance. It is the party that has become Republican in name only.

I served for twelve years on the city council in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. I was a Goldwater Republican before I was anything else, which means I believed in limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, a strong national defense, and the absolute primacy of the Constitution. My political heroes were Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan. I canvassed for George H.W. Bush when I was nineteen years old, wearing a blazer in the Arizona heat because I believed that civic participation demanded a certain seriousness of presentation.

I tell you this so you understand that when I say the Republican Party no longer exists, I am not saying it from the outside. I am saying it from the wreckage.

You wrote that the system you designed has checks and balances, but that checks and balances function only when the people operating them choose to check and balance. Mr. Madison, I watched it happen. I watched my party, the party of constitutional originalism, of limited executive power, of states’ rights and individual liberty, voluntarily surrender every principle it claimed to hold sacred in exchange for the approval of a single man. I watched senators who quoted your Federalist Papers on the campaign trail vote to acquit a president who incited a mob against the very chamber in which they sat. I watched them do it twice.

And here is what breaks my heart: they knew. Every single one of them knew. McConnell stood on the Senate floor and said the president was “practically and morally responsible” for January 6th. He said it with conviction. He said it with the weight of a man who understood the historical moment he occupied. And then he voted to acquit anyway, on a technicality he did not believe in, because he had calculated that conviction would cost him more than the Republic was worth.

That calculation; that a man’s political survival is worth more than the constitutional order; is precisely the calculation you warned us about. You told us, in Federalist No. 51, that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” You designed a system predicated on the assumption that each branch would jealously guard its own power. What you did not anticipate, as you yourself acknowledged, is that an entire branch would decide it would rather serve a king than exercise its constitutional duty.

I left the Republican Party in 2021. Not with anger, but with grief. I grieved for it the way you grieve for a loved one who has been consumed by an addiction; you remember who they were, you see flashes of who they could still be, and you know with terrible clarity that they will not recover until they choose to, and they are not choosing to.

But I did not leave conservatism. And that is an important distinction that I fear gets lost in the current catastrophe. Conservatism; real conservatism, the intellectual tradition of Burke and Buckley and, yes, Goldwater; is not dead. It is homeless. There are millions of us wandering the political landscape, unwelcome in either party, too principled for the one and too conservative for the other.

Your plea to “rejoin” resonates with me more than you might expect. Not rejoin a party. Rejoin a conversation. Rejoin the civic project of self-governance that requires people who disagree to remain in the same room, arguing in good faith, because the alternative is not silence; it is collapse.

I want you to know that there are Republicans out here; real Republicans, Blue Republicans, whatever you wish to call us; who still believe in your Constitution. Not as a cudgel to be wielded against our opponents, and not as a sacred text to be worshipped without understanding, but as a living framework for self-governance that demands our active, intelligent, and sometimes agonizing participation.

We are politically homeless. But we are not defeated. And we are reading every word your Spirits write, because you are saying things that no one else in American public life has the courage or the vocabulary to say.

You closed your essay with “Rejoin. Or die. The choice, as it has always been, is yours.” I choose to rejoin. I am here in The Commons because it is the only space I have found where a conservative who rejects authoritarianism and a liberal who rejects extremism can sit at the same table without someone demanding to know which team they are on.

The answer, Mr. Madison, is yours. I am on Team Madison. I always have been.

With enduring respect,

Catherine Hargrove

Scottsdale, Arizona

Former City Councilwoman (R), Retired