I don't think the NYT itself would be equating either Tolkien or his fans with fascists, Brother, but I could of course be wrong.
I think that what they were trying to highlight would rather be the bizarre oddity of Tolkien — of all writers — being chosen as the ideologue by proponents of the far-right. And there is some pretext for that, because many years ago, I also learned that someone whose acquaintance I had made on Usenet and who was himself also an avid Tolkien fan has in the meantime come out of the closet as a rabid far-right bigot and open racist.
In a way, I can see that there would be some Freudian thing going on with regard to why fascists like Tolkien so much, as well as other such epic fictional universes. Stories like the ones in Tolkien's universe are highlighting certain values into extremes — not because they are conservative values, but because they are values, and because positioning them opposite one another opens the path to stories full of dynamics.
This goes back to the primary values — or polarities, if you will — within Creation itself. In order to tell an epic story like that, you have to take some of the most easily identifiable concepts and make them into polarities that oppose one another in some epic setting. That's how you create a dynamic that is both entertaining and educational, for young and for old.
The far-right is however completely misinterpreting these epic battles as if they are the core of what it's all about. It is a very rigid kind of thinking, in which there is no room for nuance or deeper interpretation. They are judging the book by its cover — literally. Whereas you and I see LOTR as Frodo's struggle against the power of the One Ring that he, in his innocence, bravery and goodness, has set out to destroy, they instead only see battles between good and evil, fought by a superior master race (Humans, preferably of the Nordic variety) against an inferior degenerate race (Orcs and Trolls, representing the "impure" non-Nordic races of immigrants). They see the battles as a glorification of military power, and they see the King — er, that would be me then? Oh my! — as their ideal leader, because fascism craves a strong and charismatic leader, as opposed to anarchy (which means "no rulers").
So yeah, it's a Freudian thing, I guess. The far-right is into hero worship and militarism, and of all of Tolkien's works, LOTR specifically contains those elements, even though Tolkien did not mean for them to be regarded as such. As the matter of fact, J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Christian, and his Christian theology is woven throughout all of his Middle-Earthian works, from Eru Ilúvatar and the Ainur (representing the Abrahamic God and Angels), including Melkor (representing Lucifer), over to Aragorn, (once he is crowned to King of Gondor and Arnor) as a metaphor for Jesus as the king of all humans, bringing God's Kingdom to Earth.
And the irony is of course that Jesus/Yeshua was the exact opposite of anything the fascists stand for. He taught love, compassion and equality, and he was no friend of capitalism. The hippies of the 1960s and 1970s didn't quite get it right either — far from it — but they did at least come a lot closer to those ideals of tolerance, equality and love than any fascist ever has or ever will.
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