quote:
The trees in lord of the rings are the libertarians.

They didn't want to go to war because it "didn't effect them" until they walked to other side of the forest and realized a significant chunk of their friends had been destroyed.

While Tolkien himself was disdainful of discussing the LOTR in strictly allegorical terms, the Ents could also be read as a physical representation of an anthropomorphic natural world fighting back against the increasingly mechanized and industrialized society that Tolkien abhorred.

The Ents were raised to action by the total depravity of Sauron’s minions in Mordor and their entry into the conflict were instrumental in the ultimate defeat of Sauron.

Some scholars have made a convincing argument that the brave Ent “Treebeard” — the eldest and wisest living entity in Middle Earth — was indeed based on Tolkien’s close friend (and sometimes literary rival) C.S. Lewis.

FWIW, Tolkien described his own political sympathies — in an obvious self-contradiction — as leaning toward either anarchism or monarchism:

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy, (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy…”*

Tolkien’s apparent affection for the contradictory political philosophies of anarchy and monarchy could indeed be summed up in the realm of the Hobbits in Middle-Earth.

Tolkien himself said he identified with the diminutive denizens who lived in the idyllic Shire with no rigid political structure beyond devotion to community and clan, a tradition the Hobbits inherited from an ancient kinship to the Kingdom of Men.

If a political philosophy could indeed be applied to the Shire, it would be akin to the voluntarist-minded philosophy of distributionism , championed by Catholic apologists G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

C.S. Lewis described distributionism this way:

“I believe man is happier, and happier in a richer way, if he has ‘the free-born’ mind. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; in adult life, it is man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize it’s ideology. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”*

*Source for direct quotes in italics above: The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord Of The Rings by Peter J. Kreeft.