A Cartoonist is Keeping Organizing at the Forefront
With Sofia Warren
A few weeks ago, I sent out a poll asking what kind of history would be most helpful to learn about as we enter another Trump era. Over half of respondents answered “activism we can emulate.” (Shoutout to the 8% of you who selected “quit crying and entertain me!”)
In light of the survey results, I thought I’d share a more recent, grassroots history lesson, courtesy of New Yorker cartoonist Sofia Warren. Sofia is the author of Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator, a graphic memoir about her experience embedded with New York State Senator Julia Salazar during the last Trump presidency. I found Sofia’s takeaways about the importance of organizing and community action, not to mention the difficulty of drawing Andrew Cuomo’s face, very relatable, and I hope they resonate with you, too.
In addition to her work for The New Yorker, Sofia is a visiting professor at Wesleyan University and the author of You’re Doing Great, an advice column on Substack. A condensed, edited transcript of our conversation is below. You can also listen to the interview on the Skipped History podcast:
Ben: So, Sofia, how did your project begin?
SW: It’s interesting to look back on it now because it came out of the first Trump presidency.
In 2018, I wasn’t unpolitical, but politics wasn’t at the forefront of my life. I had certainly been dramatically affected by the Trump presidency—going to protests, donating to Planned Parenthood, and that kind of thing. But there hadn’t been a substantive shift in how I engaged with what I thought of as politics at the time.
There was this woman in my neighborhood, Julia Salazar, who was running for office. I didn’t know her personally, but we had some friends of friends in common. She was running for State Senate as a Democratic Socialist in North Brooklyn. It was a really interesting campaign—very in my face, with a ton of energy and a really robust grassroots effort.
In part because she felt close to me in various ways—like in age—it cast a light on the ways I’d come up short in making politics a bigger part of my life. That’s what sparked the project. When she won, I emailed her and said, “I’m a cartoonist, I live in your district, and I’m interested in following you around for your first legislative session to see what happens.”
Ben: It’s very fun to have you as a character in the book—when, for example, you describe Salazar as following you around because of all the posters of her in your neighborhood. On a more serious note, that might also explain why you took out a restraining order on Bono when U2 was promoting their most recent album.
SW: I did, and I won. I’m here to say you can do it, too.
Ben: The subject of your spinoff.
Let’s talk about Salazar a bit more. What issues mattered most to her and her constituents?
SW: In 2018, a package of tenants’ rights protections was set to expire, and people all across the state had come together to form a broad coalition focused on electing candidates who would advocate for tenants' rights. Rent laws in New York have historically been robust because there are so many renters, but there’s also significant real estate influence in New York politics.
Salazar, along with several others in that election cycle, was elected with the backing of the tenants' rights coalition. The thing about a movement candidate is that there’s no expectation of a cult of personality or blind trust. They don’t expect you to just say, “Don’t worry about it; I’ve got this.” They know you shouldn’t trust politicians completely. If they let you down, you don’t vote for them again—that’s the understanding.
Ben: Unlike, say, Andrew Cuomo, who was governor at the time. In the draft sketches you include in the book, he comes off looking like someone dressed up as Uncle Fester from The Addams Family.
SW: His face is so hard to draw!
Ben: The whole process of documenting conversations, arguments, and debates—all while drawing people—seems hard!
SW: The project involved a lot of things I hadn’t done before—being embedded in a team, writing about it as a book-length project. I wanted to spend a significant amount of time with this group of people so I could really get to know them.
Thankfully, that part was pretty easy because they believe in government transparency. Even when it wasn’t comfortable or flattering, the project of this office—and the larger movement—was about giving people access to governmental structures and power.
I went into the year thinking, “Okay I’m going to sit in the office for the next six months, and everyone will just be working on the tenants' rights bill nonstop.” But of course they work on so many things, including the state budget, finalized each year around April 1st, though it often gets delayed.
Ben: To be fair, it’s hard to get anything serious done on April 1st.
SW: We passed a fake budget—$500 million for whatever you want!
The budget becomes a major hurdle in the calendar. Once it passed when I was there, things really heated up with tenants' rights. The coalition had been around for a while, building on a long history of organizing and repeated attempts—sometimes unsuccessful—to pass various pieces of this legislation.
With more tenants' rights-friendly legislators in office, one of the goals was to push this package further than ever before and secure even stronger protections. The coalition organized bus trips to bring people from all over the state to the legislature. They held press conferences and escalating actions, including sit-ins and protests where people were arrested. Some of these actions were tightly organized, while others took on a life of their own.
That unpredictability sort of worked to the coalition’s advantage. Cea Weaver, who was organizing the coalition, talks in the book about legislators coming up to her and saying, “Can you get your people in line?” And she’d respond, truthfully, “No. The only way to do that is to sign onto these bills.”
Their work really shifted my understanding of what it means to be engaged.
Ben: Is that what you mean when you implied earlier that how you think of politics has changed?
SW: One key takeaway, though not surprising, was how much of politics isn’t about politicians but about organizing and community action. I got to witness some amazing things—like how much of government work is just community board meetings or community organizations sitting in rooms together. Seeing it play out was motivating and cool.
To be clear, the book is not a coming-of-age story where I end up as a politician or something. I’m still a cartoonist. But after this experience, I feel like I have structures for engaging with the stuff I care about. Now it’s about asking, “What’s happening, how is it affecting my community, and what can I do about it?” I no longer feel like the most important thing is to read all the news all day.
Ben: For context, I've witnessed that your phone is not the most internet-capable entity anyway.
SW: I have a really tiny phone.
Ben: How did the tenants’ rights fight shake out?
SW: So Julia was accountable to this incredibly well-organized coalition. Within the legislature, she and other tenants' rights-friendly lawmakers worked to rally support from their colleagues in the Senate or Assembly. It was a lot of work, but it all built to a crescendo by the end of the session. Working around Cuomo, the tenants’ rights package passed—not completely, but it was a big success.
Seeing bills that hadn’t passed in a very long time finally go through, not to mention success made on future bills, helped me understand that these fights are long. There are setbacks, but it’s not like Trump is the only bad thing that’s ever existed. There were problems before him that worsened under him, but there have also been people organizing and fighting for their communities against harmful forces long before him—and they will continue to do so long after.
Ben: In a similar vein, you connect Salazar’s election to the State Senate in 2018 to 1920, when there were five socialist state assembly people elected in New York (and then expelled amid the Red Scare).
SW: Exactly. And I just want to mention that I think the title of the book would imply that it’s going to be about socialism, but it barely is. Certainly, Salazar identified as a Democratic Socialist. It got her a lot of headlines while she was running. And it certainly shaped her politics and the politics of a lot of the people she was accountable to.
But most of the book is about organizers who are members of community groups, and their work was profoundly inspiring. I’m not poring over every piece of legislation coming up in the State Senate because I’m not that kind of wonk. But I do care about people, my community, and the harm that bad actors in power can cause—whether to abstract groups or specific individuals. And the experience reminded me there are structures to tap into and tools available to use—grassroots organizations, mutual aid organizations—that become crucial when things are bad.
I’m still figuring out how to engage with those lessons in a sustained way. For me, it’s about finding what feels meaningful in my life—figuring out the things that are already a part of my world and organizing around those. It’s a continuing project, but it’s definitely important for me to keep it at the top.