THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

"Deep indeed run the roots of Evil, and the black sap is strong in them. That tree will never be slain. Let men hew it as often as they may, it will thrust up shoots again as soon as they turn aside."

It is with this depressing thought that Borlas begins his dialogue about the nature of evil with his interlocutor Saelon in The New Shadow, J.R.R. Tolkien's scrapped sequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The text is brief, just the beginning of a novel that was meant to show "the inevitable boredom of Men with the good." Amazon has brought attention to what occurred before the trilogy in its new series The Rings of Power, but it is worth examining the few pages Tolkien wrote in which he explored what came next. His understanding of human nature makes what little of The New Shadow that he wrote deeply insightful, and an unsettling warning about our own political climate. [...]

The storyline will sound familiar to anyone paying attention to the politics of millennials and Gen Zers today. In our time of unprecedented wealth and safety, the once-defeated foe of illiberalism has made a reappearence. Young leftists have increasingly positive views of socialism, while young right-wingers have increasingly positive views of nationalism. As Jonah Goldberg laid out in Suicide of the West, illiberal views in the West are due largely to a lack of appreciation for how good we have things right now, a lack of understanding of how we got here, and a lack of understanding of how a radical overhaul of society would alter the world as we know it. This is especially true of younger generations, who have little to no direct experience with the failures of illiberalism. Having not witnessed others try and fail, they're more open to limiting free speech, race-based nationalism, polyamory, and a whole host of other ideas that were long thought unacceptable in America.

Tolkien has a sharp understanding of this peace-time radical mindset, and in the little he wrote of The New Shadow he managed to capture not just how they think and are motivated, but how they operate in early stages as well. In The New Shadow, Saelon never outright says he's in the cult. He hints at it, and tries to draw out Borlas' view of it by using language and references that would be familiar to only those in the know. The radicals of today use the same strategies, using words that mean little to outside observers, but show a deeper, esoteric meaning to fellow travelers, like bringing up land acknowledgements to show that you're a true believer on the far left or casually dropping the white nationalist Sam Francis' name in conversation to show that you're a true believer on the far right.

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