President Biden should drop out of the presidential race, but not because he is too old or too infirm.

He should drop out because he is not criminal enough to win.

The United States has broken bad—just look at our guns, our drugs, our major corporations—and a good and decent man no longer seems up to the job of running the country. We want our leaders to be scary because the world is scary. We’re looking for someone more cunning, more brutal, willing to violate the law or Constitution to serve and protect us.

This, not age, is the real story behind the reaction to the first presidential debate. Donald Trump broadcast his criminal id, lied constantly, defended his lawless January 6 coup, and suggested he would commit new crimes against the republic. For this, he was judged the winner. Meanwhile, Joe Biden played the kindly forgetful grandfather standing up for the rule of law and democracy—and created a political crisis that has many in his own party seeking to drive him from the race.

This post-debate reaction is hardly surprising. Criminality is politically powerful. Trump surged in his fundraising and maintained his lead in the polls after a New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal from voters his liaison with a porn star. Now, Democrats are encouraging Biden to behave more like Trump, by raising his voice, demonizing doubters, and talking as tough as Clint Eastwood’s convict in Escape from Alcatraz.

Some Americans remain puzzled that Americans would elect a criminal, or anyone who behaved like one. But the only real puzzle is why anyone is puzzled.

Criminal daring has always been useful to democratic leaders. Writing during the French Revolution—that violent and criminal launch of the modern republic—the Marquis de Sade, who spent much of his life in prison, observed, “It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system.” From France to Brazil and beyond, human beings vote for politicians whom they suspect of crime and corruption.

There are three reasons for this. One reason is that the criminal or corrupt may be better than the alternatives. (Ask Louisianans about “voting for the crook” Edwin Edwards for governor over the former Klansman David Duke). Another reason is that being a president or prime minister requires dealing with foreign leaders who are criminals (see Putin, Vladimir).

Another, less discussed reason is representative: We humans want to see ourselves in our politicians, and we humans are a crooked species.

“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms,” Émile Durkheim wrote in his 1897 classic Suicide: A Study in Sociology. “We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization logically imply it.”

Americans may not read much Durkheim, but our profoundly punitive country rivals dictatorships and autocracies in its fervor to lock up its people. So, it’s perfectly natural for huge percentages of Americans to want to see a convicted felon in the Oval Office.

Today, after generations of mass incarceration, one in three American adults has a criminal record. For context, that’s the same percentage of working-age adults who have four-year college degrees. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University once determined that if all the Americans who had been arrested held hands, they would circle the globe three times.

If such comparisons don’t grab you, here’s something more political. In raw numbers, about 80 million Americans have a criminal record of some sort. Back in 2020, Joe Biden received just over 81 million voters in the November presidential election. As of spring 2024, 80.7 million Americans were registered as either Democrats or Republicans. Criminality and party membership are similarly common American experiences.

Which is why the Democrats should make sure they replace “good and decent” Biden with a convicted felon.

I mean, why give Trump the honor of making history as the first-ever convict in the Oval Office?

Alas, by this logic, my fellow Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, won’t be Biden’s replacement. As a prosecutor with deep law enforcement experience, she’s the wrong fit for a country this crooked.

The good news is that other distinguished Californians boast criminal records. The actor Danny Trejo, an Angeleno, has developed a devoted following after spending his young adulthood in most of the great state prisons, including San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad, Vacaville, and Susanville. But Trejo is 80, and not nearly as well known as the best choice to take on the Biden mantle:

Snoop Dogg.

Born in Long Beach, Snoop (aka Calvin Broadus), 52, would bring clear convictions to the campaign: for cocaine possession in 1990, for gun possession during a 1993 traffic stop, and for charges of drug and gun possession in 2007. Snoop was also tried and acquitted of murder in 1996, an experience that more presidents should have, since the job is about making life-and-death decisions.

What makes Snoop the best choice, among the one-third of Americans with criminal histories, is just how expertly he’s mined his record to produce one of the most diverse and enduring careers in 21st-century entertainment. He’s a rapper, record producer, actor, tastemaker (with a taste for cannabis), comic, poet, author, and game show host. In 2022, demonstrating more mainstream credibility than any living politician, he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show.

And choosing a VP would be a no-brainer. Snoop and his friend and business partner, fellow ex-con Martha Stewart, have worked together on everything from TV shows to a line of handbags. Together, the two would make an unbeatable and utterly indecent presidential ticket.

Democratic elites, who include a lot of lawyers, might feel uncomfortable with someone with Snoop’s past in the White House. But that’s only because they fail to appreciate just how much the federal courts have changed the job.

Just this year, the Supreme Court made two rulings that blew the door wide open for criminal presidents. First, the court ignored the plain text of the 14th Amendment to determine that even a person who had committed the crime of insurrection against the country couldn’t be thrown off the ballot by a state. Then, earlier this month, the Court’s six-member conservative majority found that presidents have near-total immunity for crimes they commit in office.

If both the people and the highest court in the land want a crook in the White House, who dares stand in their way?

The post Dump Biden. Run Snoop appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conventional wisdom is that California’s greatest art is produced by collisions between the different peoples and cultures in the centers of our biggest cities.

But if that’s true, how did Vallejo become the state’s creative capital of hip hop?

The small North Bay city of 120,000, in rolling out generations of acclaimed rappers, makes the case that, in our era of hyper-connectivity, the isolation of life on the outskirts can be an especially powerful and distinctive form of artistic inspiration.

Indeed, most of Vallejo’s long line of rappers—from Mac Dre and E-40, who came to prominence in the late 1980s, to the new group SOB x RBE, which broke out internationally with a standout song on the Black Panther soundtrack—come from the same out-of-the-way hilly neighborhood, Country Club Crest.

“The Crest,” as it’s known on thousands of recordings (it’s also a more accurate name because there’s no country club), is small, with fewer than 10,000 people in a suburban-style community of single-family homes. But it sits on the far northern edge of the city, up against the Napa County border, cut off from the rest of Vallejo by Highway 37 and Interstate 80. The neighborhood has remained determinedly African American in a city that has become notable for being one of California’s most mixed places (Latinos, non-Hispanic whites, Asians, and African Americans each comprise at least 20 percent of Vallejo’s population).

That sense of separation makes The Crest a self-contained hothouse of conversation. On a recent visit, I wandered into intense talks between neighbors at Dick Bass Park, in front of King’s Supermarket, and on several sidewalks where people were working on their cars.

And the city of Vallejo has given its citizens plenty to talk about, with municipal ups and downs as dramatic as the colorful rollercoasters of Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, the theme park that borders, and looms over, The Crest.

The neighborhood was settled after the Second World War by African Americans who were looking to buy homes. But the middle-class aspirations of The Crest have been repeatedly challenged—by drugs and gangs in the 1980s, by the economic wallop when nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard closed in the 1990s, and by the Great Recession and housing crisis of the 2000s, which hit especially hard in the Bay Area’s outskirts.

The recession also produced a civic trauma that defined childhood for today’s rising generation of rappers: the city of Vallejo’s bankruptcy, which lasted from 2008 to 2011. The bankruptcy was precipitated by the city’s economic decline and by the unsustainably high retirement benefits of Vallejo firefighters and police officers. In an effort to dig itself out, the city chose to protect its own employee’s pensions, balancing the books by making huge cuts to government services and the city jobs upon which many Vallejo residents depended.

For all the damage these disasters wrought, they also have inspired Vallejo’s rappers. The seminal figure of Vallejo rap was Mac Dre. His groundbreaking records established the “hyphy movement,” which addressed life’s difficulties with hyper, flashy, humorous, dance-friendly beats, perfect for partying with his drug of choice, “thizz,” or ecstasy.

Mac Dre was generous in supporting local rappers and building a homegrown music culture. In the process, he came to define Bay Area hip hop in opposition to Southern California. While L.A. rappers style themselves as gangsters (high and mighty and corporate because of the proximity to Hollywood), Bay Area rappers were hustlers: sweeter, idiosyncratic, more entrepreneurial (starting your own small label was celebrated)—and thus more relatable, since California is a state full of hustlers.

Since he was shot to death in 2004, at age 34, Mac Dre has become an even bigger figure—a regional patron saint—whose ethic of mutual aid is best embodied by his legendary contemporary E-40, who still serves as a mentor to up-and-coming rappers from Vallejo and the Bay.

There is a bittersweet side to hip hop’s connection to Vallejo. When hometown artists rap about the city, they express pride in being from Vallejo, and having survived its poverty and crime, but less pride in Vallejo. Rappers have taken on everything from the bankruptcy to the housing crisis (one young rapper, Benny, often recounts his decision to stay in Vallejo and live in a car after his family was evicted from their home and moved to Sacramento.)

Rappers have been particularly critical of the city’s police department (all the way back to Mac Dre, who declared that “the biggest gangstas are on the VPD”)—and with good reason. Statistics show that Vallejo police have one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings and police use of force in the state. And examples of police shootings from Vallejo—including last year’s killing of a rapper, Willie McCoy, who fell asleep in a Taco Bell drive-thru—helped drive the successful push in the legislature for a new statewide legal standard on police conduct.

All the rapping about Vallejo’s problems does rankle some locals, who point out the rhymes are often scarier than the reality. (There were just six homicides in Vallejo in 2018, down from 18 the previous year).

But the Vallejo of rap music is a winner with audiences and critics. Last year, the New Yorker magazine named SOB x RBE’s song “Paid in Full” one of its 10 top songs of 2018, praising the “delightful, prancing spite” of that group of Vallejo teenagers, who produced their first songs on a PlayStation. Today, SOB x RBE are performing across North America and offering a faster, more freewheeling updating of the style forged by their Vallejo forbears. The group has a special ability to make stories of rough circumstances sound like fun.

Another young rapper from Vallejo, Nef the Pharaoh, has argued that this gift of gab is characteristic of his hometown.

“We’re very manipulative, you know? We can talk our way out of a bad situation,” Nef told the music writer Justin Carroll-Allan. “Vallejo went bankrupt, yet we still manipulate people to move there, we still manipulate people to come spend money at Six Flags… We manipulative. In a good way, in a bad way—however you want to take it. We smooth.”

In a chorus from his album “Fresh Outta Space 3,” Nef made explicit his theory of Vallejo: when you’re from the littler place on the outskirts, you do what you must to make sure you’re not ignored.

Big trucks, big grills
I just bought my baby boy a big wheel
My city’s small and I’m big, now that’s trill
When they ask how I live?
Everything big

The post Why Small, Beleaguered Vallejo Is Huge in California Hip Hop appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Reading about the new hit movie about the groundbreaking rap group N.W.A., you might think the biggest problem facing Compton is its unfair and outdated reputation for the violence and gangs that were the subjects of N.W.A.’s music. But today, Compton may have a bigger problem: the reality that it’s boring.

The Compton depicted in the film, which topped the box office in its debut week, is scarily entertaining—a mix of menace and schemes and murder. In this, it fits decades of screen and studio portraits of the city—“bodies on top of bodies, IV’s on top of IV’s,” as the Compton hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar has rapped. And the people? As the late Eazy-E put it in the title track of the 1988 album from which the film takes its name, “Straight Outta Compton is a brother that’ll smother your mother and make your sister think I love her.”

Give credit to these artists. Turning the small city of Compton—with just 10 square miles and fewer than 100,000 people—into a huge national brand and icon of the West Coast ghetto was one of the great marketing tricks of our age. But it’s a profoundly peculiar success. For all the artists name-checking Compton in studio and on screen, Compton itself remains almost entirely invisible in its own mythology.

The new film, typical of the Compton genre, is not really about Compton but instead about brilliant and ambitious music-makers who have left the city to make it big. Compton is invoked as the tough place that shaped them, but in the brief scenes set in the city itself, it doesn’t look that tough. There’s a conversation on the pleasant mall outside City Hall, shots of kids riding motorbikes down a street with nice lawns and houses, and a sun-splashed shot of a cemetery.

These are merely brief glimpses of the truth: The real Compton does not fit the ghetto cliché—and would surprise rap fans the world over if they were to visit. Yes, Compton is poor and has serious educational challenges (fewer than 60 percent of adults 25 and older are high school graduates). But it’s really a working-class suburb, defined by its single-family homes and neighborhoods like Richland Farms, with lots big enough for elaborate gardens. Only 19 percent of its housing is multi-unit, compared to 31 percent across California. And Compton’s south side, along the 91 Freeway, is a thriving industrial and business district that includes the corporate offices of leading grocer Ralphs.

While musicians have portrayed Compton as an upstart, it is actually one of Southern California’s oldest cities. Griffith Dickenson Compton and other pioneers came there in 1867 from Stockton. Throughout its history, Compton has served as a hub—its nickname is “the Hub City”—connecting the bigger municipalities of Los Angeles to the north and Long Beach to the south. Its residents included people who worked in the oil, aviation, and manufacturing industries that propelled Southern California forward in the 20th century. And the city is integral to the histories of generations of rising Southern California families—first poor whites, then African Americans in the post-war era, and more recently Latinos—who made their first homes there. (My own great-grandparents—Paul Mathews, a businessman, and his wife Nancy, a juvenile officer for the Long Beach welfare department—are buried in a mausoleum off Compton Boulevard.)

But Compton’s rich history has been obscured by decades of media reports on crime and gangs, racial and ethnic conflicts (first between whites and newly arrived blacks, more recently between blacks and newly arrived Latinos), and public official corruption. As a young Los Angeles Times reporter covering Compton early in the previous decade, I was one of those reductionist media sinners, focusing almost exclusively on corruption and mismanagement in the city, community college, and schools. People in Compton often argued, with good reason, that my focus was unfair, since Southern California has no shortage of cities with similar problems.

Then as now, Compton’s leading citizens have been eager to correct the many misimpressions of the city. Today, with the new film in theaters, they are making the case again on social media and via a website. The good news is the facts are on their side. Surveys show Compton is a good place to start a business (in part because of city assistance). It has a smart and strategic mayor and has seen sharp declines in murder and violent crime.

But, outside the city, the old impressions of Compton have held, and that’s not entirely the fault of reporters or rappers. Civic leaders talk so much about the negatives they’ve mitigated that they haven’t advanced a compelling counter-narrative of what makes Compton special. Recently, they’ve been touting the replacement of the local swap meet with a Wal-Mart, and the development of the Gateway Towne Center, a modern mall with all the same chains (Home Depot, Staples, Target, 24 Hour Fitness, Starbucks) you find just about anywhere. That desire for normalcy is understandable in a city too long associated with exceptional social ills. But it’s also boring.

Instead, Compton needs attractions and places that are entirely its own—and will draw not only its own residents but also people from around California. This ought to start with redesigning its shabby major thoroughfares—from Long Beach Boulevard to Rosecrans Avenue—to make them more inviting to pedestrians, bikers, and patrons of the many local small businesses there. The city could also take down decayed buildings that obscure the attractive neighborhoods and thriving parks just off the main drags.

Compton could turn problems into advantages. The media often dwell on conflict between blacks and Latinos, so why not push back by promoting cultural fusions that draw from African American and Latin American traditions? (I would make the drive more often if there were a restaurant serving, let’s say, great Southern barbecue enchiladas). Compton’s reputation gives it relatively cheap housing in an expensive region; why not exploit that affordability advantage to develop more housing, particularly around transit centers?

With L.A. County’s public transit system undergoing a major transformation, Compton is poised to re-establish itself as a Southern California hub. The three-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. Transit Center, which combines a Blue Line stop with retail and office space, is a good start. Here’s another idea: lobby Southern California universities to relocate existing transportation research institutes and faculty to Compton.

Most crucially, Compton must stop running from its gangster rap reputation (which, like it or not, is here to stay) and find creative ways to exploit it. On “Animals,” the best song on the new album Compton released to accompany the movie, Dr. Dre raps, “We need a little bit of payback.” So does Compton; wealthy entertainers who profited by telling the worst stories of Compton should devote their names and dollars to creating destinations in the Hub City.

Dr. Dre, who was both a member of N.W.A. and a producer of the new film, already has. He committed this month to donating royalties from the Compton album to establish a first-class performing arts and entertainment venue, with an attached youth center. The city has long desperately needed just such a space. And imagine other, related possibilities—like a professionally curated museum of hip hop or a top-notch school of the arts.

It’s time to build a Compton as interesting as its reputation.

The post Straight Outta Boring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.