In Bernie Sanders’s wake, the socialist left has experienced a historic resurgence. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which now counts over 25,000 members, is the largest socialist group in the United States since Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s.

The challenge now is to hone its political vision and build a durable and democratic organizations that can affect real change. A focus on winning single-payer health care can help us do that.

The growing demand for single payer rankles establishment Democrats, who insist that the Affordable Care Act — with its labyrinthine subsidies program meant to provide coverage without undermining the private insurance industry — is the best deal on offer, and to demand anything more is pie-in-the-sky and politically counterproductive. But with Obamacare given reprieve for the moment (albeit unsafe from future attacks), and our still-broken health care system on everyone’s mind, socialists have an opportunity to organize ordinary people toward a better common goal: genuine universal coverage, managed and dispersed by democratic, transparent, and efficient institutions that are accountable to us, not corporate shareholders.