Daniel Larison is just about one of the smartest conservatives around. He’s a writer and editor at The American Conservative*, has got a PhD from the University of Chicago and a sensibility that hearkens back to Peter Vierick and the Southern Agrarians: anti-imperial, leery of corporate capitalism, regionalist, and fiercely independent. He’s one of the most scathing critics of the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism around, and he’s not afraid to call people out on their foolishness, even when they’re (putatively) on his side. Yet he still manages to get high praise from his peers on the right. So, naturally, when The New Inquiry—an online venture described by Jonathan Lethem as “evidence of book culture’s lastingly bright future“—offered to put […]