What does your beard say about you?

The Earth didn’t exactly shake when the New York Yankees announced that they would allow their players to wear beards.

- Stephen L. Carter, Tribune News Service

However, the change in the half-century-old policy could stand as a symbol of our cultural epoch. That's because, for the first time in over a century, beards are coming to be seen as markers of the ruling class. No, seriously. And not just because when JD Vance took the oath, he became the first bearded vice president since 1909. The beard, which in my lifetime has been treated as synonymous with oddball, has become a thing again. Even Prince William has joined the bewhiskered. Some fear that the revival represents nostalgia for a lost masculine ideal, or maybe, as Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner said, it’s just that the current generation believes their facial hair is part of their individuality.

Either way, if one walks, say, the streets of Midtown Manhattan, one spies the clan of the bearded streaming in and out of the office towers — a sight that, just a generation ago, would have been unthinkable. Indeed, for much of late modern history, the barbigerous were regarded with skepticism. During the 19th century, the European monarchies associated beards with dangerous radicals. So did the dangerous radicals. Historians tell us that Marx and Engels grew their famously fulsome facial hair, at least in part to symbolize their rejection of middle-class morality.