The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People is the first in a three-book series. In this series author James Thomson traces the destruction of America's majoritarian political system. In this book, Mr. Thompson explains that the degenerative process began during the decade leading up to the War for American l Independence. He recounts how Sam Adams orchestrated the revolution using a method pioneered by placeman John Wilkes as he connived to win a place for himself in England's aristocracy. Adams learned from Wilkes that he could shape public opinion and build support for political resistance to British rule by speaking in "the voice of the people." It was Adams's genius, Mr. Thompson explains, to clothe his violence-ridden insurgency against King George III colonial governments with rhetoric that portrayed the aggressors as the victims of governmental tyranny. The great majority of Americans, Mr. Thompson calculates, never accepted this. A second step in the degeneration of American political society took place during the 1790s as James Madison managed the so-called "second American Revolution" for his secretive neighbor. In the second book in the series, Mr. Thompson traces Madison's campaign to strip Thomas Jefferson's political enemies from their control of America's new republican government. Jefferson's adversarial method of party politics became standard for all political candidates after Jefferson defeated Aaron Burr in the House of Representatives and became the nation's third President. Of course, by 1861, the social divisions and regional animosities Jefferson's adversarial system produced were so great that the nation's agrarian south end the Union with its succession and ignited a bloody civil war. In The Third American Revolution, Mr. Thompson argues that President Franklin Roosevelt started a third revolution by creating bureaucratic government in the 1930s. During the decades that followed, an increasingly corrupt, incompetent governing class consolidated the power of the government in its own hands. The author explains that this privileged network, having established itself above the people, implemented a Tocquevillian Tyranny of Benevolence in which it is the shepherd, and the American people are, supposedly, its obedient flock.