While I get the whole 'the personal is political' thing and that how you live your life can in itself be a political statement... I don't think that particularly makes goth a phenomenon of the left.

Particularly because at the time goth was being born in the UK (I have a lot less knowledge of the US), "the left" was still pretty old-school socialist, with the fringes still agitating for actual communism, and neither political left nor right was particularly interested in progressive reform of society.

And while some bands are overtly left wing (see New Model Army), I don't think it's all of them by any means.

So sure, it can be 'political' if you view everything as political, but I take issue with it being described as 'VERY left'. It's only of the left when viewed through the prism of modern (US) culture wars and social polarisation. At it's best it's egalitarian and as I said elsewhere, very libertine, and very anti-authoritarian. But hardly a movement agitating for a workers revolt to seize the means of production, and the destruction of the bourgeoisie

I don't know how it was in the late 70's and 80's, but by the 90's, the U.S. right wing had solidly established itself as fundamentally authoritarian (and Evangelical authoritarian at that) in a way the left had not, so goth was left-aligned (to the degree that the U.S. has a left) in the U.S. just by virtue of goth being anti-authoritarian.

There was also this whole thing in the U.S. in the 80's and 90's, where the Religious Right (who were and are a very significant and loud part of the U.S. right) specifically targeted people into "dark" music, including goth, and dark fashion as "Satanic" and a fundamental threat, which also played into it. You couldn't really *be* a right-wing goth in the U.S. back then, not openly, because we were one of their hated scapegoats.

So I'm not arguing that goth is of the right, or that there were lots of conservative goths around back in the day, but ... I also don't think it belongs on the left as some sort of leftist movement. I know goths who lived in housing cooperatives and expressed anarchist views, and I know goths who went into banking and finance. It's a subculture concerned with music and aesthetics and companionship and *fun* and thumbing your nose at the mainstream and dancing all night and ....

I think perhaps one thing I'm struggling with is that socially liberal and progressive views are *really* associated with the left in the US, but it's a much looser association in a lot of other places where politics is more multi-dimensional, especially in countries where the (soft)right doesn't wear its regressive, religious-authoritarian agenda on its sleeve as much.