What Is JD Vance's Beard Telling Us?-CurrentLens

What Is JD Vance's Beard Telling Us?

2025-02-05 17:57:27 Source： Classification：Focus

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Not quite two months since being announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance has made an impression: The first major-ticket running mate to pick a bone with the cat lady community has achieved double-digit net disapproval and delivered the most normal donut order in history. But perhaps most intriguingly, with his salt-and-pepper scruff, he's reignited a long-dormant national conversation about the politics of facial hair.

It’s been more than a century since a president or vice president wore a beard, and nearly 80 years since a White House hopeful has sported any sort of facial hair. Before his selection as running-mate, several pundits speculated Vance’s beard would be a dealbreaker for Trump, who’s been wary of whiskers in the past—allegedly passing over John Bolton for a Cabinet position because of his mustache and telling Don Jr. to shave his quarantine beard on a podcast in 2020. Trump’s views line up with enduring societal stereotypes that have kept Washington clean-shaven since the early 20th century: Beards were seen as unprofessional and unruly—a look for hippies and Communists, not politicians. Lately, however, it appears the GOP has done an about-face.

“There’s now this real affinity for beards among the right wing,” says Christopher Oldstone-Moore, an Ohio historian and author of Of Beards And Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. “What’s significant is that beards still play the same role: It’s countercultural. It's a protest. It’s ‘I’m not part of the system. I’m against the elites. I’m my own man.’ That's what the left wanted to say back in the ’60s, and now that's what the right wants to say.”

Beards might be an attempt at a new symbol of rebellion on the American right—a shaggy middle finger to the establishment. And Vance, whose face was baby-butt smooth before 2022, is not alone: Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric currently wear prominent beards, alongside conservative senator Ted Cruz and Republican congressmen Corey Mills and Derek Van Orden, among others.

But does channeling a 2009 hipster lumberjack aesthetic really count as rebellion? It would seem to spring from the same impulse that leads conservative men to wear skinny jeans and slim suits—once-cool silhouettes now a decade out of date. Turn on, tune in, and cancel your cable subscription to the lamestream media—and please buy an election-denier pillow and some scammy gold coins while you’re at it.

Beards were a staple for Victorian-era politicians, but they fell out of favor as fears grew that they were bacteria magnets, potentially spreading diseases like tuberculosis. Facial hair also came to be associated with revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Karl Marx, and later, terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, says Allan Peterkin, a Toronto psychiatry prof who wrote One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo. “Because of those unconscious biases, most politicians aren’t willing to take the chance that their face will be misread,” he says.

The 39-year-old Vance’s tightly cropped bristles—which Trump has complimented, saying he resembles “a young Abraham Lincoln”—may be part of a larger Republican effort to capture the youth vote, say some right-wing observers.

“The Trump campaign saw how narrow their loss was in 2020 and said, ‘Okay, if we can make some small changes in a certain number of demographic groups in the key swing states, we'll be able to make a difference,” says Steve Hilding, a Las Vegas-based Republican political consultant, who estimates half the millennials in his office have facial hair.

“I think the Republican Party wants to put on a younger look than the traditional nominees of the past, and JD Vance's beard is emblematic of all that change. Beards are definitely shifting away from the countercultural left and becoming more in style in general, especially among the conservatives.”

Hilding points to Cruz’s transformation during his 2018 U.S. Senate race against Beto O’Rourke—when he ditched his squeaky debate-team captain aura for a beard and a Carthartt jacket—as an example of the attempted Benjamin Button-ing of the right.

Vance could be similarly rebranding himself as an everyman after shooting to fame as the clean-shaven author of bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, who called himself “a Never Trump guy” and worked as a venture capitalist.

“I think it’s a calculated move to make him appear more relatable,” says Cassondra Kurtz, founder of New York barbershop Beyond the Beard, who notes she’s seen more c-suite types coming in for beard trims ever since the pandemic. “A lot of CEOs and CFOs I work with will acknowledge they find once they start growing out their facial hair, people feel more inclined to just chat with them.”

Kurtz says Vance’s full, short beard brings to mind something “cherubic, kind, and likable.” And that approachable, pull-up-a-stool vibe should strike a chord with the MAGA set, embodying rugged individualism and a defiance of the polished, elite image of the know-it-all smarty-pantses who supposedly run Washington.

“If you look at Trump’s rhetoric, it’s all about how terrible the elite is. Drain the swamp. The deep state. Everything is rigged against us ordinary guys and we’ve got to fight the system,” says Oldstone-Moore. That anti-government stance has shades of the hippie movement. “The language they’re using even sounds like what the ’60s guys were saying, even though it's coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum. And the look goes with it.”

There’s a certain edgelordiness to Vance’s scruff as well. Conservatives have been positioning themselves online as the counterculture for today’s youth for years, and the beard might be an extension of that, says Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a D.C.-based scholar of extremism and radicalization.

“It's very aligned with what a younger, very right-wing attitude online has tried to do, which is to say, ‘We’re the counterculture against the boring, triggered mainstream that's so concerned with political correctness.’ The sharing of memes with hateful content, the weaponization of youth culture online—it’s that same kind of attitude,” she says.“The facial hair evokes a bit of that same feeling of snubbing the nose at the mainstream and at respect and norms that the mainstream sets about appropriateness or what we should say or do.”