Odd, as the man is criticising Tolkien and Lewis, both part of the Oxford literary elite.
The literary in-crowd is riddled with exclusive and highly specialized cliques who have become "out of touch" with everyone and thing outside: that's the point.

I have to remark time and again the amazing skill of so many posters of criticising an opinion without reading it.
Physician, heal thyself! But I'm cool with it if you are. :S

I suppose anyone who shakes one’s cosy feelings of yearning for bad fantasy literature is to be dismissed as one who never read any of it, of course...
Nice strawman, bro.

If you believe 19th century romantic authors to have made “sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration”, I imagine quite a few are right now turning in their grave.
Moderation of aspiration in fantasy? Where? *Don't actually reply to this, please. It's rhetorical, and is addressed below-low. *

As for romanticism: this should make it clearer -

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
He begins
by dividing fiction, somewhat unorthodoxly, into three divisions—
romantic, realistic, and imaginative. The first ‘is for those who
value action and emotion for their own sake; who are interested in
striking events which conform to a preconceived artificial pattern’.
The second ‘is for those who are intellectual and analytical rather
than poetical or emotional … It has the virtue of being close to life,
but has the disadvantage of sinking into the commonplace and the
unpleasant at times.’ Lovecraft does not provide an explicit definition
of imaginative fiction, but implies that it draws upon the best
features of both the other two: like romanticism, imaginative
fiction bases its appeal on emotions (the emotions of fear, wonder,
and terror); from realism it derives the important principle of
truth—not truth to fact, as in realism, but truth to human feeling.
As a result, Lovecraft comes up with the somewhat startling
deduction that ‘The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its
most essential sense.’

The attack on what Lovecraft called ‘romanticism’ is one he
never relinquished. The term must not be understood here in any
historical sense—Lovecraft had great respect and fondness for such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—but purely
theoretically, as embodying an approach not only to literature but
to life generally:

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely
unsound, charlatanic, and valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant,
and meaningless—is that mode of handling human
events and values and motivations known as romanticism.
Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd! Here is sheer puerility—
the concoction of false glamours and enthusiasms and
events out of an addled and distorted background which has
no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings,
and experiences of evolved and adult mankind.

...


"But that's Tolkien!", you might protest. Sure is - I'm just making myself understood. Do not take this as alignment with Lovecraft's aesthetic sensibilities!

The actual mind-bending irony is that the critic is a Nebula prize award winning author himself, one of the most influential fantasy aficionados in the world
Tolkien was more influential. This is irrelevant. The point I should have made is that this guy restricts his analysis to a very specific subgenre of fantasy, as demonstrated by what he quotes.

I'd love to pick on some of his lines, as they are, standing alone, but I'd also rather not belabor this (too much). So...

As to your jab on “ ‘erudite’ essays”, what’s next, condemning well-read persons for being “intellectuals”?
Interesting. Discredit those you disagree with by repackaging their words as anti-intellectual. Useful trick. Will have to get that one down.

I'm surprised you didn't remark on the essay in the spoiler. It uses similar premises as yours, but takes them somewhere more interesting than the latter does, with its hackneyed this make society dumb wraghghg message.

the Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.
is equivalent to a wet fart in the shower. What you call the ambience, I call the miasma.

But look, we've clarified this: that I find Moorcock's conclusions hysterically silly, and particularly disagree with his view on the motivations for reading 'Tolkienesque' fantasy.

Moorcock: Tolkienesque is taken to mean 'pastoral'.

I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire.

Me: Tolkienesque is taken to mean something closer to 'hack-n-slash', or 'adventure'.

It's not parochialism that fantasy readers seem to be motivated by, but rather a thirst for the exotic.
Inspired by Tolkien, but not really like Tolkien. Important thing to note.
Take it or leave it, that's what I'm trying to get across. However, maybe I'm off the mark in even the specially highlighted respects!

Bakker: Maybe corroborates Moorcock! In a way. Then again - read it for yourself.

Sample:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
Both science fiction and fantasy are attempts to compensate for these impending phenomenological disasters. Both genres are consolatory. Where science fiction attempts to recover our lost horizon of expectation through narrative, fantasy attempts to recover our lost space of experience through narrative.

...

Given the gap between the intentional world of our experience (what is commonly called, following Husserl, the Lebenswelt, or ‘lifeworld’)–the world we recognize–and the deintentionalized world described by scientific theory–the world we cognize–one might expect a culture to generate surrogates, worlds where recognition is cognition. Since the scientific deintentionalization of the world has caused this lacuna, one might expect these alternate worlds to repudiate the validity of science. Since all we possess are pre-scientific, historical contexts as models for ‘intentional worlds without science,’ one might expect these to provide the models for these alternate worlds. Put differently, one might expect culture to provide ‘associative elimination rules,’ ways to abstract from the present, for the production of alternate intentional contexts which conform to, and so repatriate, the otherwise displaced space of our experience.

One might expect the development of fantasy literature or something like it.
...

5) In terms of what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference,’ science fiction is primarily an ontic discourse, a discourse concerned with beings within the world, whereas fantasy is primarily an ontological one, a discourse concerned with Being itself. What this suggests is that the socio-phenomenological stakes involved in fantasy are more radical than those involved in science fiction. In Adornian terms, science fiction, it could be said, is primarily engaged in the extension of identity thinking, whereas fantasy, through its wilful denial of cognition, points to the ‘messianic moment,’ the necessity of finding some way out of our functional nightmare.