"Is it wrong to take the minority position on the grounds that so many people can't be right?"

     Barton Swain, "Intellectual honesty," Times literary supplement no. ____ (August 11, 2017):  17.

This is where intellectual honesty comes into it.  I find it hard to dislike a public figure whom the vast majority of writers and intellectuals detest and fear and expend enormous amounts of energy denouncing and ridiculing.  Maybe they're right.  Maybe [Trump] is all the things his despisers say.  But there's just not much fun in joining the parade.  Writers don't write what everyone else is writing, because if they do no one will care enough to read them.  My instinct is to distrust, or at least to be bored by, what everyone agrees is the true and right view of things—not because I'm so high-minded and independent, but because I'm afflicted with that writerly perversity that can't quite be happy in any overwhelming majority.  It's not so much contrarianism—the desire to contradict for its own sake—as a suspicion of consensus. 

     Is it intellectually dishonest, though, to hold a view in part because you regard those who hold the opposite view to be silly or off-putting or distracted?  Or to ask a related question:  Is it wrong to take the minority position on the grounds that so many people can't be right?"