hello, i hope the question isn't too weird ! i've read your posts about how jrrt's works unfortunately seem to appeal to nowadays fascists and conservatives and you made excellent points about it but i wanted to ask ... why despite this objective reality it still appeals so much to leftists? i mean there are still people who would swear that jrrt was actually a secret progressive. it's just a matter of 'everything i love is secretly leftist' as you commonly see on tumblr or it's something else? i'm just curious i hope the question isn't too uncomfortable.
well, to be fair left criticism v. conservative apologia was fairly central to the tolkien debate c. the 70s, so I would not say the appeal to fascists & conservatives is new, so much as that its mythos is being integrated into their mythos more broadly now because the generation of fascists that exist now grew up reading Tolkien.
As for why it has the appeal it does... Well firstly, I mean, I don't think its the "everything I love is secretly leftist" of it all. If at all, I think the "everything I love is secretly leftist" follows from people connecting to the story and therefore wanting to read their own politics into it, in order to justify their love: its a reversal of cause and effect. People say that because they want to justify loving the thing, because to love the thing is to say something about themselves.
Secondly, I think its perfectly possible for people who espouse left politics to enjoy conservative art. Engels famously enjoyed Balzac. Good art made by conservatives will often embody a tension between the writer's ideological beliefs and their desire for realism, captured through observation. Tolkien's works are basically rife with this. A desire to hew to realism, to say something true about who people are and what people do and how they move in the world, will puncture ideological considerations & is ultimately more integral to creating a really good work of fiction than anything else.
And in that regard, Tolkien is a good writer! There's some criticism of Tolkien's characters being "flat", but I do feel that some of those criticisms also emerge from his refusal to work with the stream of consciousness style that became integral to writing c. the 1940s onwards. Within the mythic mode they occupy, his characters are rendered with a lot of sympathy and three-dimensionality, with I think significant attunement to the very real ways in which people work that is quite humanist in philosophy, despite Tolkien's catholicism. Their heroism is not decoupled from fear or despair, but occurs despite it. They have petty feelings, they suffer from irresolution, they struggle with the meaning of the world and their place in it, they ask themselves about nature v. nurture, they wrestle with fate, they wonder what they can make of their world, they seek home and belonging, they have ambitions, they struggle against those ambitions being thwarted, they struggle against the shape of their social world, they long for a better world.
Even at its flattest, when you're deep within the noxiously racialised structuring, you still have instances of characters like Faramir look with sympathy on the Haradrim, for example, and wonder about their lives and interiorities; or Orcs having very human complaints about their working conditions & bad (and incompetent) bosses. Tolkien's anti-war strain is, I think, his most humanist characteristic and what keeps him from falling deeply into a "just war" framing that enables eternal war and frames it as unproblematic. Tolkien sees war as an aberration, as an evil, and also therefore, as something that cannot be delighted in but is an absolute last resort. This coupled with his ability to lend each character a little note that makes them feel "real" and like a person you might meet/know, means that there are points at which the narrative even within just LOTR interrogates this structuring of the world and asks if everyone is not suffering because of the acts of a single, enslaving tyrant. At all points, this commitment to a certain realism even within fantasy means that you don't just have a work that's a vehicle for ideology.
Leaving aside the question of saying something true v. ideology. The other aspect of Tolkien that I think appeals, is that he's constantly wrestling with the question of "will to power" and "domination" as a bad thing. He approaches this with a deeply Christian lens, but I think this is also a theme that has appeal across the political spectrum - the understanding of what "domination" is one that shifts across political lines, but its sufficiently ideologically open-ended within the legendarium (i.e. is not framed explicitly in terms of either racial glory/triumph OR class struggle), that it has cross-cutting appeal. Also, despite his deeply Christian lens, what made it into publishing very much does position the Valar as fallible - good, but fallible - and therefore, as beings that are also growing as the world grows; wrangling with the nature of the world they've been bequeathed and their responsibility towards it. So even though the narrative operates on an Un/Marred binary, in actual reality, there is room for mistakes & goodness to coexist & for even the gods to be imperfect (compare against Lewis who follows a strict perfect/good and evil/marred binary where deity/magical figures are concerned)
I do pick at Tolkien's volkisch romanticism around nature, but the truth is that its also written in ways that aren't confined to a singular blood-and-soil ethic, but one that also comes of a very personal love for nature. I think people do respond to that. Like, ofc one wants to resist romanticisation & the loss of nature in terms of "the long defeat" which is a squarely conservative ideology - and yet one wants to also talk about it, and Tolkien does talk about it. To Tolkien, evil goes hand in hand with the ruin of the natural world - and this is again, something that I think people intuitively connect to, especially if you're a nature-enjoyer. All of us have seen, at some point, the destruction of parts of the natural world that we love; all of us have thought of this as terrible, sad, perhaps even evil. How we frame this loss is what differentiates right wing, conservative ideologies from left analysis; but the emotional experience of that loss, and also the description of that beauty, is something that cuts across ideology.
Also, I'm ngl. I read a fair bit of 1930s era lit and Tolkien manages to be more sympathetic to women living in a misogynist world than... a lot of writers by miles. He does love to subsume them back into traditional gender roles, but he also offers them a lot more sympathy before that subsumption in how they're described - Galadriel's rebellion is positioned on par w her brothers & not treated as horrifying; Aredhel's departure from Gondolin is seen as natural, her imprisonment by Eol as straightforwardly awful; Luthien's imprisonment by her own father is treated as unjust and something that everyone knows is unjust (the Leithian in fact explicitly says Thingol builds her a treehouse because if he confined her elsewhere, she would die); Eowyn's desire to fight, is treated as natural; Elwing's suicide is treated as a natural consequence of her experience & as a grievous harm resulting from violence; Miriel's death is treated as a grief but not a condemnation of her (any condemnation is refuted very directly by the Valar themselves); Indis' marriage is treated as a joy & at no point is Indis implicated in it, as so often younger, second wives do get short shrift in even say, the average Agatha Christie novel; Idril's refusal of Maeglin is treated as well within her right; Nerdanel leaving Feanor is treated as something well within her right and justified, as is Indis leaving Finwe. Arguably Tolkien offers these women more empathy in their depictions than most of contemporary so-called feminists & progressives in fandom.
Put together, I think there's a lot of elements that appeal emotionally to readers with left politics, in addition to the fact that Tolkien has crafted a clever, immersive and beautiful world. If you hold him up against contemporaries, even though his works derive heavily from a Catholic worldview, at no point does he veer into the sort of simplistic moralisation around characters that you get, say, in C S Lewis (in this regard, he is closer to G K Chesterton; another great but horribly conservative writer) & a lot more "forgiveness" is offered to even "bad" characters (even if, as Charles W. Mills observes, this forgiveness is limited within the racial hierarchy). Certainly he has a lot more of a humanist lens turned on people than even, say, the average Agatha Christie novel. It all adds up to create a work which, while conservative in structure, allows for points of connection and for the possibility of recuperative and non-conservative readings.
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