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I think the OP's point would be better stated as not so much liberal but liberal adjacent. Few men had facial hair in the 1950s, and those who did were either immigrants, bohemians, or men old enough to have been around the last time beards were in fashion. Then they were adopted by the 1960s counterculture, along with long hair and other fashion choices, as a deliberate rejection of mainstream aesthetics. By the 70s, while some of the hippie fashions had decidedly died, facial hair had become fairly mainstream. But you have to keep in mind how this looked to someone born before the early 1940s: They would have been well into adulthood by the time facial hair hit the mainstream, and would have grown up in an era when it was at least somewhat unsavory. To a member of Nixon's Silent Majority, facial hair was seen as sloppy, and was associated with hippies. Think of Abe Simpson's opinions of Joe Namath's sideburns, or George Steinbrenner's facial hair policy with the Yankees. And what kind of politics were the hippies associated with?
I'm glad you brought up Waylon Jennings here. Waylon has an image as a good 'ol boy, an image that's right-coded today, but that wasn't always the case. The transition of the South from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one was just beginning when he came to prominence, and it was hard to tell what kind of impact the 1972 election had on the Southern Strategy when Nixon won in such a landslide. The South wouldn't go Republican in a non-landslide election until 2000. While most Southerners weren't liberals in the hippie sense, they weren't stereotypically conservative in the traditional sense either, lingering views on racial issues aside.
Then you have to add the country music landscape into the mix. Nashville was in a bit of a crisis in the late 1960s, as traditional American styles like jazz, country, and traditional pop were being rejected by the new generation in favor of rock and R&B. Mainstream country circa 1967 was defined by a slick, mainstream sound that was decidedly unhip. This was the top country hit that year. It could have easily been recorded ten years prior and was only country by virtue of the acoustic guitar and light pedal steel. It's no surprise that, for how big that song was on the country charts, it didn't cross over to the Hot 100 at all, and Jack Greene isn't exactly a household name today, even among country fans. Even the venerable Johnny Cash was in the middle of a dry spell, putting out crap like this. This isn't to say that there weren't great songs from this era or any crossover success ("Stand by Your Man" being the prime example), but it was clear that things had to change with the times.
This process was an awkward one. Willie Nelson had had a few hits in the 50s but spent most of the 60s drifting, his label not knowing what to do with him, and was thus a prime candidate for the kind of experiments that went nowhere. While the albums he made at RCA with Chet Atkins were certainly interesting, they weren't exactly good. One bright spot was Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison LP, which revitalized his career. The fuck all attitude became a template for the next wave of country stars in the 1970s: Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and of course, Waylon Jennings. Outlaw country was country reclaiming the edge it had lost over the past couple decades, rejecting the nudie suits of the Opry for a countercultural image that glorified outlaws, gamblers, hustlers, and all sorts of other questionable characters at the margins of society. It told stories not just of love and loss but of adultery and murder. Johnny Cash may have hit #1 with Kristofferson's "Sunday Monrnin' Comin' Down, but for my money Waylon recorded the best version of it, capturing the feeling of a sad loser with no place to go. Compare it to Cash's version, which, with it's forced chick-a beat and tacked-on orchestration, sounds out of another era entirely. And there was no easier way to signal the start of a new era visually than for the three icons of the genre to sport beards, combining countercultural associations with images of a romanticized American West.
After ten years, though, long hair and beards don't have quite the same impact, especially since the look has been increasingly adopted by the mainstream, so the youth who want to be hip have to find new ways to freak out the squares, first with mohawks and piercings of the punk era, then the big hair androgynous look of 80s pop metal, just to name two examples. In the meantime, the 1980s has seen the mainstream embrace a more clean-shaven look, and while plenty of normal people still have mustaches and beards, the prototypical yuppie doesn't, and most musicians and media figures don't. In 1992 grunge is starting to replace hair metal as the rock music of choice, and bands like Pantera are entering their heyday in an attempt to reclaim metal from the commercialized dross it had become. And what was furthest from the look of the hair bands? The long hair and beards that were popular 20 years prior, when bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were making music that actually did have and edge.
What about those pre-boomer squares I mentioned several paragraphs ago? They didn't go away. They're older now, but voting in records numbers. Any mainstream man over the age of 50 probably wouldn't have ever considered growing a beard and wouldn't have had an affinity for any music past the pre-Beatle 60s. To them, all the changing youth hair fads of the preceding three decades were just one amorphous mass of people who didn't know how to present themselves. A guy like Bill Clinton could at least sympathize. He didn't have a beard, but he used beard aficionados Fleetwood Mac for his campaign song, and was the first rock and roll president. The Republicans, on the other hand, ran guys like Bush and Dole in the 90s, who yammered on about family values in a fairly naked appeal to an America that was corrupted by hedonism. Which side of the aisle do you think would have been more likely to listen to Pantera in that environment? Do you think a guy like Dan Quayle would look at Dimebag Daryl as the kind of gentleman he'd hope his daughter would bring home?
The Democrats, of course, weren't much better on this front, with Tipper Gore founding the PMRC and still having to appeal to the kind of older voters that are suspicious of guys with beards. But any way you slice it, there was still an association with countercultural weirdos, whether they be hippies or metalheads, and they were more likely to be worn by rednecks (who were still voting Democrat in large numbers), blue collar union voters (whose jobs didn't rely much on appearance), hippie holdouts, and, yes, college professors, who at that time were largely of the generation that was in college in the 60s and 70s. They were much less likely to be work by the Bible Belt Values Voters and businessmen who made up the Republican base. They still weren't mainstream enough that a politician of either party could wear one without the risk of alienating a sizeable number of voters; even if the stereotype was dying, it wasn't worth the risk (for the record, my grandmother, a lifelong Democrat born in 1925, hated beards, especially the one my uncle occasionally wore). Now that that generation is mostly gone, and anyone under the age of 80 is of the generation that made facial hair acceptable, it's okay for politicians of any party to bring the look back.
I'll add another to this list, from what I know about my own state from that time period: backwoodsmen. The Alaskan "sourdough" is pretty much never clean-shaven.
In fact, AIUI, facial hair has pretty much always been more common on (non-Native) men here in AK as compared to the rest of the US. And maybe it's that we're a "red state" on top of that, but I don't recall facial hair ever being particularly "left-coded" here, at least within my lifetime — it was more that being clean-shaven was often the sign of a Cheechako (newcomer) and/or military.
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Okay, so, this is all a fairly decent summary, but all it demonstrates is that the Democrat-Republican split basically failed to map in any coherent way onto a liberal-conservative axis well into the 21st century. You’re correct that Bob Dole and Jerry Falwell would have been horrified if their daughter had been caught dating Dimebag Darrell Abbott; however, a good mainstream 90’s liberal like Phil Donahue would be equally horrified, because Dimebag was the kind of guy who proudly displayed Confederate imagery. (And, again, he’d be far more mortified by his daughter dating Phil Anselmo, especially after seeing this clip of Phil throwing a Roman and shouting “White power!”)
And hell, even if you want to stick to country music and you want to claim Jennings as a “liberal”, how about guys like Travis Tritt? An openly Republican Bush-voting conservative, who had long hair and a beard throughout the whole period you’re referring to? I don’t think Southern guys at the time would have thought Tritt looked out of place at a honky-tonk — let alone that he looked like a leftist academic.
Basically what I’m saying is that beards and long(ish) hair could pattern-match to “working-class Southern man who drinks a lot and doesn’t act like Ned Flanders, but who also doesn’t like faggots or egghead professors” just as easily as it could pattern-match to “ex-hippie with proper NPR-approved beliefs” during the time period OP referred to.
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