On a recent Sunday morning, I wandered dazed among the hordes of well-heeled holiday shoppers at the Marin Country Market in Larkspur, California, self-conscious as always of my mangy appearance and the condition of my beat-up, stolen-then-recovered pickup truck, which I parked sheepishly in the furthest corner of the lot.
Here, in Marin County, the holiday pony rides were wrapping up for the weekend. Enormous Koi fish swam in a fountain between a Birkenstock store and a SoulCycle. Families decked out in “quiet-luxury” athleisure milled about. Luxury SUVs formed a traffic jam at the entrance to the parking lot, and a little boy, his face covered in hot chocolate, pointed at a white Rivian with his eyes wide.
“That is not our Jeep,” the boy said to his mom, who nodded approvingly.
Just a few weeks earlier, this county, a paradisical, mostly suburban community sitting across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, voted over 80 percent to support Proposition 50, a partisan redistricting of California’s congressional districts that would advantage Democrats — and combat a similar effort taking place in Texas that would advantage Republicans…