It how the left rewards him for his liberal views.
I'm not sure he's a liberal.
I heard an interview with him long ago on a college station (it was perhaps NPR); the interviewer asked him a leading question about Vietnam, inviting him to comment on the politics of it.
Bob Dylan declined to answer, saying something like "a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that because I sing about certain things in my music that I agree with this or that side in a political context, and I would only say that you might be disappointed if I told you what I really think about that subject."
I actually know someone who has a family member that worked for Dylan back in the '80s. According to this person, he is almost completely apolitical; when Dylan is hanging out with people he trusts, the number one thing he likes to talk about is music, of all kinds, but particularly folk music.
As I understand it, he got very, very interested in folk music when he was growing up in the iron range town of Hibbing, Minnesota. It just became his whole life, and there's pretty much nothing he likes more than folk music and the telling of stories through music.
Dylan is no liberal/progressive.
His protest songs are universal. Even a song that was ostensibly about early-60s counterculture could be read as a conservative protest in the age of Obama.
Not just that, but he converted quite openly to Christianity in the late 70s, and lost a lot of fans because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSsEkqdiaX8