Manufactured Movements: The Politics of Crafted Authenticity
Leveraging Vernacular Language and Everyday Imagery to Shape Perceptions of Popular Support
Some organizations intentionally adopt the speech, symbols, and style of ordinary people to simulate grassroots participation, while in reality promoting carefully engineered, elite-driven agendas that influence public opinion, policy, and political outcomes.
By Judy Wallace. I study culture and religion with a focus on pilgrimage, using a broad twenty-first-century historiographical approach that expands the meaning of pilgrimage across cultural and religious contexts. My work carefully distinguishes culture from religion, using academic terminology objectively while remaining evidence-based. As an Orthodox Jew, I acknowledge humane and faith-informed limits to neutrality, integrating ethical reflection without compromising scholarly rigor.
Some organizations present themselves as grassroots, community-driven movements. In these cases, they adopt the language, symbols, and style of “ordinary people.” They use everyday speech, local imagery, populist slogans, and common-sense framing. At the same time, these groups are often strategically designed, funded, or directed by elites, institutions, or professional politicos/clergy. In other words, their appearance of authenticity is carefully constructed. The groups imitate real grassroots political action without being genuinely bottom-up. They are organized to influence public opinion, policy, elections, or regulations. This can occur formally, as in PAC-like structures, or informally, as in advocacy campaigns or issue coalitions. In practice, these organizations combine the surface of popular participation with hidden, professionalized agendas. As a result, they create the impression of citizen-led movements while advancing strategic interests behind the scenes.
At left. National Electric Light Association Award in Gold, 1929 Doherty Medal, issued by National Electric Light Association, made by Medallic Art Company, 1929, http://numismatics.org/collection/2010.13.2?lang=en
The National Electric Light Association (NELA) operated in the early 1900s in the United States. The organization represented large, investor-owned electric utilities.[1] NELA opposed municipal ownership of electricity. To achieve its goals, NELA’s leadership consisted of corporate executives and industry elites but the campaigns were strategically designed to appear as grassroots opposition. In order to influence public opinion, it sponsored “citizens’ committees.” It also distributed pamphlets written in accessible, populist language.[2] These materials were intended to warn the public that public power could threaten ordinary households. Ernest Gruening’s The Public Pays (1931) remains one of the earliest analyses of the utility industry’s national campaign against public ownership, drawing extensively on Federal Trade Commission investigative material to document how associations like NELA shaped educational materials and press coverage to frame private power as beneficial.[3]
In contrast, astroturfing has a unique characteristic. The term astroturfing illustrates a clear tension between language and meaning. Specifically, it is a metaphor that arose naturally in popular discourse. In fact, the metaphor describes the simulation of grassroots activity. At the same time, it relies on the widespread recognition of a branded product. Similarly, other brand names have followed a comparable path. For example, xeroxing has come to mean photocopying, while Kleenex refers to facial tissues. Likewise, Band-Aid is often used for adhesive bandages. In each case, the words moved from trademarks into everyday nouns or verbs. Notably, this shift usually occurs without corporate approval. Unlike these other cases, the metaphor names deception rather than function. In this way, artificial grass becomes a symbol for manufactured civic authenticity.
Importantly, the AstroTurf® corporation seeks to protect its trademark by avoiding lowercase or generic usage. Consequently, this situation produces a layered irony. On one hand, a grassroots linguistic practice exposes false grassroots politics. On the other hand, it simultaneously weakens the semantic control of the brand that originally inspired the metaphor.
In conclusion, deliberately constructed or staged events or sites are designed to draw attention, but they differ sharply from modern pilgrimage vigils, which emerge through spontaneous popular acclaim. Modern pilgrimage, broadly understood as journeys to sites of popular, religious, or cultural importance, is often marked by candles, flowers, notes, stuffed animals, or wayside crosses. These acts transform ordinary locations into spaces of valorization or memorialization, raising a question I can ask but not yet answer: to what extent does grassroots recognition shape a site’s significance, and how does it interact with formal commemorative practices? Considering this tension helps connect the dynamics of spontaneous participation to broader patterns of simulated grassroots movements. My continuing study on pilgrimage studies may come to provide evidence supporting the thesis that some organizations simulate grassroots participation while advancing carefully engineered, elite-driven agendas.
[1] 1. H. S. Bennion, “The National Electric Light Association,” The Military Engineer, March–April 1931, vol. 23, no. 128 (March–April 1931): 163–66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44566340
[2] 2. Steve Horn, review of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (London/New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), How the Electric Utilities Industry Created One of the ‘Largest’ Propaganda Campaigns in U.S. History, DeSmog, February 21, 2023. https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes‑conway‑the‑big‑myth‑free‑market‑capitalism‑climate‑change‑mont‑pelerin‑society/
[3] 3. Ernest Gruening, The Public Pays: A Study of Power Propaganda (New York, NY: Vanguard Press, 1931).