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Perhaps the difference is best explained in that you, Aiwendil, accept Tolkien's myth for what it is, whereas your like-minded counterparts fail to understand that "Tolkien wasn't writing a political book", to quote Mr. W.C. Hickli.
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I suppose that's true. However, I think there may be more to it than that. I know that Tolkien wasn't writing allegory; but if I detected, shall we say, right-wing 'applicability' in LotR I would certainly dislike it (and the same goes for any other ideology I dislike).
To put it another way, while I certainly do not take Tolkien's work to contain a political or philosophical "message", I do think that (as in all really good stories), these kinds of themes can be found below the surface. But what I find under the surface is nothing like the extreme reactionist conservatism that Brin et al. seem to find. On the contrary, the ways LotR explores issues such as environmentalism, the tendency of power to corrupt, inter-racial cooperation, and even capital punishment fit very well with my left-leaning views.
So I think that Brin and friends are not wrong merely in that they read LotR as a political work; I think that the politics they read into it are the wrong politics.