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Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni founded a conservative political conference named for a hero of a 1979 bestselling fantasy novel, used to cosplay as a hobbit, and in 2023 had a museum exhibition commissioned about JRR Tolkien. Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting and democracy-sceptic tech billionaire, leads a Silicon Valley trend of company names derived from The Lord of the Rings, from his own data intelligence group Palantir (magical stones found in Middle-earth) to the weapons maker Anduril (a Tolkien sword). US vice-president JD Vance has said his conservatism was influenced by both Tolkien and CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books.
In other words, a fascination with fantasy literature unites European nationalist conservatives, Trump tech bros, and the Maga movement. Is this a coincidence? Or does something about fantasy fit the rightwing mind unusually well?
In the Italian case, the fantasy fandom has been “more psychological than political”, says Salvatore Vassallo, political science professor at the University of Bologna. It was important when Meloni and her entourage were young and their section of the right was excluded from the political mainstream by its baggage of fascist “cultural references they could not express” in public.
Fantasy as publicly palatable ersatz reactionary philosophy, then? To be sure, many themes in this literary canon would seem to fit that bill.
For example, it is easy to see how medieval social hierarchy and essentialist racial categorisation, both common to fantasy worlds, could appeal to reactionary world views. It is also easy to see the draw of the traditional and the ritualistic for those recoiling from modernity. (Vassallo says that Meloni and others’ love for Tolkien was “congruent with something they thought about themselves: ‘pure’ people struggling for values they appreciated but that were undervalued by others around them”.)
But some of these observations are cheap shots. After all, much fantasy can be spun the other way: heroes defy their social hierarchies; fellowships across racial lines defeat evil. A supposed aesthetic dislike for modernity has no place in Silicon Valley’s techno-optimism.
The clue, I think, rather lies in how fantasy tends to the heroic. These are stories of personal persistence in the face of Manichean adversity. They are stories where virtue wins; where individuals — if they can make the right choices, adopt the right values, follow the right instincts — beat the system. They are, one might say, stories of the triumph of the will.
That aligns nicely with populism. It supports the idea that troubles in people’s lives are caused by malign forces and that certain special individuals can take those enemies on and win. Both notions underpin the rhetoric offered by populists for why people (“the” people, no less) should vote for them. “I am your retribution”, as Donald Trump has said.
Populism can be right or left. But in another way, the fantasy genre’s triumph of the will is (as befits the term) easier for right-wing populists to run with. It sublimates a dread of being determined by society’s impersonal structures and a wish for our own choices and values to shape the world around us. It reflects a desire for control, power, and a transparent mechanism from individual choice to social effect — a desire, in short, for an epic world rather than the modern one.
Fantasy represents less a return to a premodern idyll, then, than a fulfilment of the freedom the Enlightenment promised but social complexity took away. This is harder for the left to buy into, for social structure is what the left is all about. On the personal level, leftwing existentialists may want to break the grip of social expectations. But politically, the left embraces the primary importance of social structure and sets out to shape it, while the right aims to leave it in place (in reactionary versions) or destroy it (in more libertarian versions).
Those pure rightwing dreams are destined to fail. We live in modernity whether we like it or not; society inevitably structures our choices. But is it surprising if the resulting frustration feeds a yearning for magical rings and amulets — or powerful but hard-to-fathom technologies?
There is, however, another lesson to be found in fantasy literature. A deep structure binds people and nature together in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, for example. These are works about the limits of what individual power can achieve, and how it must be used to restore balance and reinforce structures rather than blast through them. Perhaps Giorgia, Peter, JD and their friends should read more fantasy, not less.
martin.sandbu@ft.com
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