Socialists just seized the commanding heights of New York City.

On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani — a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — won the mayoralty of America’s largest municipality.

Mamdani’s election constitutes a triumph for America’s long-suffering socialist movement — possibly, the most significant in its history.

His victory may therefore lead some Americans to ask the question: What do these people actually want?

Or, more specifically: How do they think “democratic socialism” would work, in practice? Do Mamdani and his allies want to make America into Norway — or into a kinder, gentler Soviet Union?

These questions have no single answer. Pose them to two socialists and you’ll get three opinions. But Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist magazine Jacobin, has sketched one of his movement’s clearest blueprints for a democratic socialist society. And he will soon publish a more detailed account of that vision, which he calls “market socialism,” in a book coauthored with his colleagues Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs.

To better understand this vision of market socialism — and see how well it holds up under scrutiny — I spoke with Sunkara this week. We also discussed Mamdani’s victory and what Democrats can (or can’t) learn from it. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What’s your understanding of how Mamdani won?

He ran a campaign that was laser-focused on issues of affordability, at a time when New York City is in an affordability crisis. The rest of the country is seeing real wage increases and New Yorkers are not. Obviously, the main cause of that is the ridiculous price of housing in the city, but there are other causes as well.

The campaign had a Bernie Sanders 2016 vibe. People would go to his rallies and he would just say, “freeze the ____” and everyone would shout “rent!” There was a level of repetition that the left learned from the Sanders campaign.

And that’s just good politics. The Mamdani platform can fit on the back of a business card. By contrast, certain Democratic Party politicians seem to have a different white paper for every little segmented group.

And then, he’s handsome, he’s a good communicator, and just dynamic. In the closing days of the campaign, he was out in Queens talking to workers on graveyard shifts. He was just campaigning with a level of ferocity that none of his opponents were. And he was running against a disgraced former governor, a mayor who has his own kind of charisma but is facing corruption allegations, and a bunch of center-left technocrats who just did not have it.

When you first imagined democratic socialists taking power in New York, is this how you pictured it? Did Zohran’s specific path to power surprise you in any way?

I was surprised that Zohran won. I was definitely a supporter from the beginning. But I thought of it more as a pressure campaign — to bring cost-of-living concerns to the forefront of the race.

What really surprised me was that, in the primary, Zohran actually did the thing that Bernie Sanders tried and failed to do in his presidential campaigns; he mobilized groups of people who were previously not voting in these low-turnout primaries. He mobilized young people, he mobilized some immigrant non-voters. In general, I’ve been critical of this mobilizational theory of politics: The idea that the left can win mostly by virtue of being more left-wing, putting forward the right set of demands and activating a public that doesn’t already exist. But in this case, it happened.

Many have framed Mamdani’s victory as proof that the left has a model of politics that can defeat the right nationally.

Skeptics, however, say that this overstates what Mamdani actually achieved: The Democratic Party already knew how to win mayoral elections in New York City. Just because democratic socialism can defeat Andrew Cuomo in a blue city doesn’t mean it can win swing states.

I think Zohran shows that democratic socialism can actually win and energize people in many parts of the country, particularly in deep blue districts.

It’s also true that socialism may be a liability in places that aren’t like New York City. We also need figures like Dan Osborn.

The populist, independent Senate candidate who ran a strong (but losing) campaign in Nebraska last year.

Right. We need candidates like that who can translate populist economic messaging to a very “red” part of the country.

And in many ways, Mamdani and Osborn are different expressions of the same set of egalitarian politics — a politics that seeks to create a fairer deal for working-class people. Obviously, they have different stances on social issues, they have different affects, they have different backgrounds. But fundamentally, I think that their campaigns rested on the same basic message about economic dignity and corporate accountability.

A centrist might argue that you’re misconstruing the roots of Osborn’s success. Yes, he used populist rhetoric and spoke to cost-of-living concerns. And that was important.

But he also ran as the “the only real conservative” in his race, promised to help Donald Trump build his wall, and attacked his Republican........

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