CLARENCE PAGE: Why many GOP candidates sound like Tucker Carlson

At a time that should be a moment of glory for Republicans, much of the Grand Old Party is campaigning like a party of trolls.

“Trolling” in this social media age has come to mean the deliberate provocation of others online and increasingly on the campaign stump, blurring the line between conventional discourse and the rants of right-wing talk show hosts.

Illinois heard a taste of it in the current race for governor when state Sen. Darren Bailey, a proudly self-described “downstate farmer,” broke out of the six-person field after a May debate in which he called Chicago a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole.”

Say what? Bailey is hardly the first critic to describe the city’s recent crime woes in harsh terms. Still, throwing insults at the state’s largest concentration of money and votes is, to say the least, an unusual way for a Republican to win votes in a predominantly blue state.

Yet Bailey, who in 2019 called for Chicago to break away from the rest of the state, only doubled down on his remark. He won Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement and the nomination, assisted by $30 million from Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association, who figured he would be the easiest Republican candidate to beat.

We’ll see. Democrats similarly have spent millions on other seemingly vulnerable far-right Republicans across the country despite the risk that in today’s moody electorate some of them actually may win.

Remember the days when a Trump victory was written off too quickly? Now almost all the GOP hopefuls are weaponizing culture war issues and sounding like Fox News star Tucker Carlson.

For example, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the contenders Trump beat in 2016, ratcheted up the right-wing rhetoric at a recent state GOP “Sunshine Summit” to denounce the Dems as “controlled” by “Marxist crazies and laptop liberals that work at home in their pajamas” and produce “incompetent leaders that will lead us into crisis after crisis.”

More down to earth, he also pointed out that working people are concerned about invoking “common sense” in issues such as gasoline, inflation, crime, fentanyl deaths and illegal immigration.

But, last time I checked, gasoline prices have been going down and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has not outlined a detailed policy agenda of economic concerns either.

In a similar vein, I was disappointed to see the Trumpian turn of J.D. Vance, a former Trump critic and author of the bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy,” who won Trump’s endorsement and the Ohio GOP Senate nomination by going the obligatory full-Trump route in his rhetoric.

He raised an unsurprising torrent of criticism for his recently unearthed remarks to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California last September that it would be better for children if their parents stayed in violent marriages than if they divorced, according to video obtained by Vice magazine and posted on YouTube.

In a response to questions from Vice magazine, Vance, whose memoir recounts the domestic violence in his own family in his Rust Belt hometown of Middletown, Ohio (which also is where I grew up), said he was “criticizing the progressive frame on this issue, not embracing it.”

“One of the great tricks I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he told Vice, was to convince people that divorce would make people happier in the long term. Instead, he said, “what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Fortunately, the domestic tumult in Vance’s family was largely resolved without divorce and with the savvy leadership of his grandma, in particular. The book, later made into a movie directed by Ron Howard, offers a heartwarming tale but, alas, no one-size-fits-all solutions.

For declining factory towns such as ours, for example, I think we also have to take into account the severe pressures that job loss and drug addiction to painkillers put on traditional family life, compared with the happier economic times in which I grew up, years before Vance.

Besides, the “sexual revolution” diagnosis doesn’t explain why incidents of intimate partner violence decreased during the 20-year span between 1995 and 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — or the studies that show higher domestic violence rates among unmarried partners than married couples.

Sure, it’s appropriate for political candidates to debate the causes of such problems. But we also need some remedies, not just speeches.

Contact Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.