Los Angeles

BRUCE YANDLE, an expert on regulation, once used the phrase “bootleggers and Baptists” to describe unlikely political coalitions that form for mutual advantage. Baptists support blue laws that require bars and liquor stores to close on Sundays, the story goes, while bootleggers favor the same regulation, so they can make a profit. Tacit coordination benefits each side, and the virtuous Baptists provide moral cover for bootleggers’ business.

The conservative activists who followed Mike Huckabee’s call to take part in the Chick-fil-A appreciation day last week played the pious Baptists to the corporate bootleggers at Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain that has been surrounded by controversy because of its conservative president’s opposition to same-sex marriage. While news reports indicate that the event was coordinated by Mr. Huckabee and other conservative leaders, not by the company, both parties benefited from the display of apparently spontaneous grass-roots right-wing activism. Conservatives flexed their political muscle, while the company (which closes on Sundays) enjoyed a record sales day.

The use (or co-optation) of grass-roots politics is a remarkable facet of the new politics of the contemporary corporation.

In a time when companies are particularly sensitive to protest groups, threats of boycott and accusations of corporate irresponsibility, corporations need grass-roots support, or at the least the appearance of it, to defend their reputations and ability to make profits. In 2004, the casino chain Harrah’s created a coalition, Winning Together, “to organize Harrah’s employees and vendors into a grass-roots network.” When for-profit colleges were faced with tough questions about student debt and low graduation rates, they created Students for Academic Choice, a seemingly grass-roots organization led by students promoting the benefits of “postsecondary career-oriented institutions.”