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Meagan Day
Meagan Day is a writer and editor focusing on class, labor issues, economic inequality, and US politics. She is an editor at Jacobin, where she was previously a staff writer. The author of Maximum Sunlight (2016) and co-author of Bigger than Bernie (2020), her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Guardian.[1] In 2022 she addressed the Oxford Union on the topic of the "American Dream" in a global context.[2] Early life and educationDay was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas.[3] She received her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College, graduating in 2012. She received her master's degree from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013, and in the years following contributed to Full Stop, n+1 and The New Inquiry. Around that time, Day began to read the magazine Jacobin, and found an interest in journalism and class politics growing.[3][4] After working briefly at Mother Jones, she was hired at Jacobin in 2017 as the magazine's first staff writer. WritingDay first received media attention for her writing in Jacobin when she was invited in 2018 to be interviewed on The Michael Brooks Show, which she would later say became the start of a friendship with the host, Michael Brooks.[5][6] Day began to appear on Michael Brooks's show regularly, along with other podcasts and YouTube shows, to provide left-wing commentary on American politics. She would later be invited to speak alongside Brooks at Harvard about the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.[7] In 2018, Day and Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara were invited to stand in for the New York Times opinion columnist David Leonhardt for one week. This resulted in the publication of five op-eds. The topics included the need for Medicare for All,[8] the importance of labor unions,[9] the need to end cash bail,[10] how to combat the rise of the far right,[11] and the need to overhaul the US constitution.[12] The latter drew criticism from right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh.[13] In 2020, along with co-author Micah Uetricht, Day published the book Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. In an interview with the Washington Post co-author Uetricht said they had written the book to speak to a combination of socialists, people who liked Bernie Sanders but didn't consider themselves 'activists', and those "who want to understand what at least one wing of this newly reborn socialist movement in the United States thinks." Day also mentioned in that interview that the way they approached the book was to ensure it would be useful no matter how the then-ongoing Democratic Party primary turned out, and so when writing about their ideas had "tried to boil it down to basics".[14] Elsewhere Day has also said that her motivation for writing the book was because "forces were amassing on the left that had great potential, but that there was not really a roadmap for what to do with that potential after the Bernie moment was over."[15] Rick Perlstein, when talking to The Boston Globe, mentioned the book as one of many "popularly oriented books on socialism" also mentioning The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright, and The Sinking Middle Class by David Roediger.[16] CriticismThe conservative commentator Glenn Beck read from and condemned an article written by Meagan Day at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference.[17] Day's work was cited in the Trump White House's report on the dangers of the growing American socialist movement.[18] References
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