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Science at villanova and author of "james madison: spirit of republican self-government." james best is here, author of "tempest at dawn." before i get to jeanine, let me come to you with this. set the scene of the constitutional convention. it was so important. and at the brink, everything would have been for nothing, the revolutionary war for nothing if this didn't come together. >> right. the nation was disintegrating and this was a do-or-die area, they were going to get something out of here to fix this, or the country would probably go into anarchy. thigh had this meeting -- they had this...

With this president, been with presidents in the past. it becomes an emergency. got to go it. got to do it. you don't even read it. so it just goes through. wasn't everything that he did basically a roadblock or a speed bump? >> he wanted to slow things down. and allow for communication between the representatives and their constituents. in the newspapers, circulating he said throughout the entire nation, so we take time to think about these things, to have second thoughts. so that the judgments we might come to are more reasonable. jefferson said the world of majority in all cases to prevail ...

So you get everything. but you can read it in novel form. what were they really, what were they dead set for and against? >> they were dead set against any centralized power. they had just come from underneath the british. and they feared concentration of power. we talk about checks and balances today. but we use it as one word. they wanted balance to also go into checks. so if you didn't have enough power, that check wasn't any good. so that is one of the reasons senators were pinted by the state -- appointed by the legislature because it gave power to the state. >> glenn: do you think the 17...

Factions. we call them special interest. everything he did in design of the government was an attempt to diminish the ability of factions or alliances of factions to take over the leaders of government. >> the problem with factions, particularly majority faction, if you have a country based on the idea of majority rule is that any passion can almost immediately become law. so madison what he wanted to do was not take away the idea of liberty to make the choices and mistakes even. and think through things but develop a system of refining and enlarging the public view so people themselves ultima...

Public opinion, lincoln said, is everything. without it nothing can succeed. with it, nothing can fail. he who holds public opinion goes deeper than he who enacts stay chutes and legislation. he makes the statutes and legislation possible. it really is a government by the people. the movement we are seeing now in the united states for example, which has different component parts and different people, this is a movement from the ground up. this is something we saw in prerevolutionary america. who knows where it will end up. voices are being heard and they are influencing public opinion. you men...