You might have thought that "folk" music, music that connects with "folk" (the ordinary people??) would generally attract people who lean towards socialist sentiment, even though they may not identify as socialists or party tribalists, or even as "political" at all. Looking at Mudcat participants, I've always found it to be somewhat surprising (and, to me, disappointing) that a good number of Brits here are (or were, some of them, before they got the boot or passed away) decidedly and expressly right-wing. In the US it has always seemed to me that there is a general and traditional aversion (with honourable exceptions) to the kind of left-wing politics that a few of we leftie Brits cheerily and openly espouse. The Democratic Party is about as left-wing as Cameron or Thatcher were, and calling Bernie Sanders a socialist was an easy slur (you'd hardly recognise him as such this end!), and, to an extent, we need to look at this interesting issue through that lens (I can't make my mind up about the Aussies here, just as I couldn't when I visited Oz - my experience was pretty limited, but politics didn't seem to be much up for discussion). Use small sample size at your peril... And who sez that Mudcat is representative anyway?

I regard myself as a "folk musician," by the way, though, as I am purely an instrumentalist, I find it slightly difficult to express any political sentiment while I'm playing :-) My mates in the pub session were universally of "leftie" sentiment, though that was rarely articulated in the banter even between tunes/songs, and, when I think back, I was probably the only one who was in any way a party animal (which, as you can imagine, would have made me very unpopular had I gone on about it). Heavily "political" songs wouldn't have gone down well with the pub crowd in these parts, and we didn't want to jeopardise the free beer...

On the subject of political songs, I've always been a long-time admirer of the singing of Dick Gaughan and Christy Moore. Many of their songs are overtly political, and I must say that I found their punch-in-the-face political proselytising too much to bear at times. Woody would never have got away with that in the political climate of the US of the time - but didn't he put across an equally powerful, if not more powerful, political message anyway, just by telling the stories in song, without bitter polemic, of badly-treated folk enduring hard times...?