Enlightenment thinkers — especially John Locke — argued that people are born with natural rights (life, liberty, property) that no government can legitimately take away. Government exists by a "social contract": people give up some freedom in exchange for protection. If the government breaks the contract by violating rights, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. Jefferson built the Declaration of Independence on this framework. It is the philosophical DNA of the American founding.

America's first constitution gave almost all power to the states. Congress could not tax, could not raise an army without state cooperation, could not regulate commerce between states, and needed unanimous consent to amend anything. Shays' Rebellion (1786) — a debt crisis in Massachusetts where the state government nearly collapsed — convinced leaders that the Articles were fatally weak. The Constitutional Convention (1787) was called to fix this. Instead, the delegates scrapped the Articles entirely and wrote a new constitution.

The Constitution was not inevitable — it required four major compromises. The Great Compromise created a bicameral legislature: the House (population-based) satisfied large states, the Senate (equal representation) satisfied small states. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a person for representation — a moral catastrophe that empowered slaveholding states. The Commerce and Slave Trade Compromise prevented Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808. The Electoral College was created as a compromise between direct popular election and congressional selection of the president.

Federalism divides power between the national government and state governments, each with its own sphere of authority. The Constitution gives the federal government enumerated powers (listed in Article I, Section 8) and implied powers (from the Necessary and Proper Clause). The 10th Amendment reserves all other powers to the states. Dual federalism (layer cake) kept the spheres separate; cooperative federalism (marble cake) has them intertwined since the New Deal. The Supremacy Clause establishes that when federal and state law conflict, federal law wins.

The Constitution divides power among three branches — legislative (Congress), executive (President), and judicial (courts) — so no single branch can dominate. But separation alone isn't enough; each branch also has tools to limit the others. Congress can override a presidential veto, the President nominates judges and can veto legislation, the courts can strike down laws as unconstitutional. Madison called this "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" — the system relies on the self-interest of each branch to prevent another from overreaching. This is why the system sometimes appears gridlocked: it's designed to make action difficult.

Ratification wasn't guaranteed. Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay) argued in the Federalist Papers that a strong central government was necessary to prevent the chaos of the Articles era. A large republic, Madison argued in Federalist 10, would actually protect liberty better than a small one — more factions would cancel each other out. Anti-Federalists (writing as "Brutus," "Federal Farmer") feared the new government would destroy states' rights and individual liberty. They demanded a Bill of Rights as the price of ratification. Without that concession, the Constitution might not have been ratified. The Anti-Federalists lost the vote but won the argument about the Bill of Rights.

American political culture rests on a set of core values that most Americans broadly share despite political disagreements: liberty (freedom from government interference), equality (equal treatment under law and equal political participation), democracy (government by consent of the governed), individualism (personal responsibility and self-reliance), and rule of law (no one is above the law, including the government). These values coexist in tension — liberty and equality sometimes conflict — and Americans disagree about how to balance them. Understanding this tension is essential for AP Government.