An Inconsistent Approach to Viewpoint Diversity

(Originally published July 8, 2025)

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick has an excellent new article about “Who Goes MAGA?” He sets out a taxonomy of the sorts of people prone to drifting into Trumpism, from “The Wellness Influencer” to “The LinkedIn Thought Leader” to “The Facebook Mom” and more. I recommend it as a catalogue of archetypes to keep your eye on.

I wanted to call out one in particular, “The Contrarian Intellectual,” in part because it’s the character class I have the most experience with, but also to highlight a example of one of the dynamics Mike notes in passing.

He’s not technically MAGA yet, but he’s on the glide path. He writes long pieces about how “the left has lost its mind” and how “we need to have difficult conversations.” He appears on podcasts to discuss “the excesses of woke culture” and “the importance of free speech.” He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.

But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.

His MAGA turn will come when he finally admits what’s been obvious all along: he’s more comfortable with the right than the left. He’ll frame it as a principled stand against progressive extremism, but really it’s just the natural conclusion of a grift that started with “I’m just asking questions.”

I’ve bolded the relevant sentence because, having worked for years in libertarian public policy—including through the rise of the culture war to subsume most other politics—it’s a move I see a lot. Let’s say you want to (1) push right-wing culture war preferences in state education while also (2) maintaining a rhetoric of liberty, limited government, and open inquiry. Obviously (1) is incompatible with (2). It’s possible that in a regime of perfect liberty, people will choose right-wing cultural preferences. But experience doesn’t bear that out. Freedom tends to lead to social liberalism. The solution is to equivocate on school choice.

Instead of giving your own opinion of the merits of bans (not just on books, but more broadly, including expression by teachers ), you can argue that we wouldn’t be having these kinds of fights at all if, instead of government and mandatory schools, we had school choice. If parents were free to send their kids to whatever school they want, and if entrepreneurs were free to set up schools catering to a wide range of preferences, then parents who want their kids exposed to, say, LGBTQ identities could send them to socially liberal schools that center and celebrate that. Parents who instead don’t want their kids exposed to these identities, or don’t want them told that such behaviors and expressions are acceptable, could send their kids to more socially conservative schools.

The school choice argument is that when parents can decide what is best for their own kids, and don’t have to worry about parents with differing views forcing those views upon them, then everyone can adopt a live and let live approach to each other. But if the school district has to pick a single curriculum, or a single standard for which books go in the library (and it must articulate some standard, after all), and every parent living in that district is compelled to send their kids to the state run schools, then disagreements become zero sum. If I get my way, you don’t get yours. If you get your way, then I don’t get mine. Thus, fights.

Now, you might disagree with school choice for any number of reasons. But this argument in its favor, even if you find it ultimately unpersuasive, isn’t unprincipled. It’s making a point about how schools could be better by being restructured to remove a frequent cause of conflict. That’s a worthy goal. And, while the person making the school choice argument isn’t weighing in on the wisdom or moral permissibility of book bans directly, it would be wrong to read the argument as supportive of the bans. Instead it’s saying, “We shouldn’t be focusing on efforts on the symptoms, but rather trying to ameliorate the underlying cause.”

The trouble is the inconsistency Mike notes. Because a great deal of the people who make the above argument also believe that both public and private universities ought to have viewpoint diversity. If you’re on the cultural right, what you likely mean by that is that universities ought to center culturally right perspectives more than you believe they do. They’re not diverse now because they heavily emphasize a culturally left perspective, so making them diverse means emphasis in the other direction.

Again, this argument can be made in a principled fashion. Even if you yourself are not on the cultural right, you can argument reasonably that, given many Americans are, it’s better for schools to expose students (who are less likely to be from a culturally right background than the typical American) to a representative range of views. Fair enough.

But if you goal—your actual motive—isn’t “all views treated equally” but instead “a thumb on the scale for culturally right-wing views,” you can slide between these two arguments (for school choice and for higher-ed viewpoint diversity) as the situation aligns with your preferences. You argue “school choice” when a school district is banning books with LGBTQ characters or telling teachers not to put a photograph of their same-sex partner on their desk. You argue “viewpoint diversity” when a university is overwhelmingly populated by left-leaning professors, or when classes don’t take Russell Kirk as seriously as they do Michel Foucault . You pick an argument to apply when that argument will get you the conclusion you want, and you don’t deploy it when it won’t.

The inconsistency exposes itself readily, however. If the answer to fights about curriculum is “school choice,” then “school choice” ought to be the answer to fights about curriculum in universities. And the think about universities is, unlike primary and secondary education, we already have nearly perfect school choice. Chances are, if you went to public school for K through 12, you went to the school assigned to you by wherever your home address happened to be. You didn’t have a choice. But if you went to a public university, chances are you had quite an array of ones to pick from. I grew up outside of Detroit but attended the University of Colorado, and could have attended universities in pretty much any of the fifty states. And I could’ve picked a private university (as I did for law school) if I couldn’t find a public one I liked. In other words, if the answer to fights about what views should be represented in a given school is simply “If we had school choice, parents could send their kids to a school representing their views, and so there’s no need to fight about any particular school,” then that same answer should trump calls for any given university to be viewpoint diverse. The CU Boulder English department was pretty lefty, true. But I could’ve gone to Hillsdale.

This equivocation allows someone to stick to libertarian rhetoric (“choice” and “intellectual pluralism”) while actually holding to a goal closer to right-wing cultural hegemony. Neither argument, choice or intellectual pluralism, is, on its own, a problem. Both are perfectly principled. Laudable, even. But if you’re going to be principled about libertarianism (which, it ought to go without saying, demands not being MAGA), you have to apply them consistently.