Single payer needs a new beginning.

It may be a new party.

It may be just a group of independents running single payer campaigns.

But whatever it is, it’s not the Democratic Party.

Nick Brana and Cornel West are making the rounds reminding us of this reality.

Brana is the former Bernie Sanders outreach director who is heading an effort to draft Sanders to lead a new populist people’s party to challenge the Democrats and Republicans in 2020.

Cornel West is the Harvard University professor and activist.

West signed on to Brana’s effort in a Guardian opinion piece titled – The Democrats Delivered One Thing in the Last 100 Days – Disappointment.

“The monumental collapse of the Democratic party – on the federal, state and local levels – has not yielded any serious soul-wrestling or substantive visionary shifts among its leadership,” West wrote. “Only the ubiquitous and virtuous Bernie remains true to the idea of fundamental transformation of the party – and even he admits that seeking first-class seats on the Titanic is self-deceptive and self-destructive.”

“We progressives need new leadership and institutional capacity that provides strong resistance to Trump’s vicious policies, concrete alternatives that matter to ordinary citizens and credible visions that go beyond Wall Street priorities and militaristic policies. And appealing to young people is a good testing ground.”

“Even as we forge a united front against Trump’s neofascist efforts, we must admit the Democratic party has failed us and we have to move on. Where? To what? When brother Nick Brana, a former Bernie campaign staffer, told me about the emerging progressive populist or social democratic party – the People’s party – that builds on the ruins of a dying Democratic party and creates new constituencies in this moment of transition and liquidation, I said count me in.”

On Democracy Now, Brana said – “there is an amazing hunger for this, especially among young people.”

“It was 91 percent of millennials, people under 29, who actually wanted a major independent choice in this past election. And the majority of Americans actually wanted it, as well, and still do – 57 percent,” Brana said. “And so, those are staggering numbers in favor of a new party.”

“And we’ve reached the point where, to address what you were saying earlier, is that what we’re trying to do at Draft Bernie for a People’s Party, the group that we’ve founded to get Bernie to start a new party, is fundamentally different than what the Green Party, Ralph Nader, tried to do, in that it follows a successful model in our own history of starting a major party that can displace an existing establishment party.”

“And that is, pulling politicians who have built a large following within an old regime party, getting them to show the limits of that party and what it’s able to do, and then having them come out, start their own party. That’s exactly what Lincoln and others did in the 1850s, when they started the Republican Party.”

“That’s how the Republican and the Democratic parties began, is when they actually reached the limits of what people were willing to tolerate—in particular, with the formation of the Republican Party, displacing the Whigs at that time over them having approved a pro-slavery platform in the 1850s, and coming out, taking that base and forming a new party. That is what we’re trying to do here again with Sanders. Sanders has the tens of millions of followers. If Bernie starts a party, that party begins with tens of millions of followers. And in my view, Bernie already built the party. He did it during the primaries. That coalition that he brought together, that’s the party. It’s just about formalizing it.”