The rise of JD Vance as the GOP vice presidential pick marks the return of the beard to the presidential ticket after 76 years in exile, potentially signposting its resurgent acceptability outside the spaces of old men, counterculture, rural communities and public figures scrabbling their way out of deep, soul-rupturing crises. Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election, Paul Ryan, who faded as a 2016 presidential prospect before he could even join the race, and Ted Cruz, who joined the race only to suffer ignominy, all re-emerged some time after their trials with a dark shadow newly cast over their lower face.
To go unshaven in the midst of personal hardship is so ubiquitous in popular media, and perhaps real life, that TV Tropes has a page dedicated to the “Beard of Sorrow.” Sometimes, the association is rooted in the idea that a man brooding over his troubles cannot find the motivation to tend to his hair. But other times in the modern day and in history, men in crisis are recorded to have grown their beards as a conscious act to express their melancholy, project strength or just find some way to reinvent themselves. Unlike Gore, Ryan and Cruz, who made the decision merely in defiance of popular convention, two 16th century popes who sprouted facial hair defied their own predecessors’ canon law banning the use of beards among clergy.
