Frederick M. Hess applauds New York University's Jonathan Haidt for leaving the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) after the SPSP required diversity statements for all papers submitted to its annual conference. "The Haidt-SPSP clash is no isolated skirmish," writes Hess. "In truth, it highlights a bigger, more consequential fight that's playing out across higher education."

According to Yuval Levin, "Congress is designed as an arena for productive disagreement," and its failure in that role has worsened public perceptions of division and dysfunction. In a roundup of 12 ideas to restore public trust in US democracy, Levin writes that reforms to help Congress fulfill that purpose could help rebuild common ground in our public life across the country.

Adam J. White identifies what he says is the "biggest legal flaw" in the Biden administration's justification for student debt cancellation. White explains how the administration's legal argument rests on a pretextual use of a "national emergency" that federal courts are unlikely to accept.

Supporters of President Joe Biden's student debt cancellation cite a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection that the federal budget deficit, as a percentage of gross domestic product, will approach pre-pandemic levels in 2023. But Mark J. Warshawsky contends that the CBO's optimistic forecast overlooks key factors, such as rising interest rates, and underestimates the 2023 deficit by nearly 70 percent.

Rethinking economic policy is one of three ways that Ruy Teixeira argues the Democratic Party could win back the voters' trust. Moderating on cultural issues and embracing patriotism, Teixeira writes, could also help the Democrats once again become "the party of the common man and woman."

In last weekends's Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan interviewed prominent French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, a passionate supporter of the Ukrainian cause who has visited the country five times since Russia's invasion began. Billing Lévy as "the man who said Ukraine would win," Varadarajan writes that "Mr. Lévy speaks of the war with the authority of a man who has seen it up close—who has been in foxholes alongside troops as they exchanged fire with Russians."