Bridges between Wedges and Frames: Outreach and Compromise in American Political Discourse

Wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of American political combat, are generally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. My inquiry here explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by American politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. Despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in American public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. I elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of American political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in American politics.