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Following the Republican Party's losses in the 2012 elections, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what the party should do to improve its electoral fortunes.

More From The Debate

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, an influential red-state Democrat who helped craft Obamacare but bucked his party last week in voting against expanded background checks for gun sales, will retire in 2014, he announced Tuesday.

The chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, Baucus was expected to face a potentially tough race for a seventh term after four decades on Capitol Hill. He becomes the sixth Senate Democrat to announce his retirement, as Republicans look for an opportunity to retake Senate control in the midterm elections.

"Deciding not to run for re-election was an extremely difficult decision," Baucus said in a statement. "After thinking long and hard, I decided I want to focus the next year and a half on serving Montana unconstrained by the demands of a campaign."

The Washington Post had first reported the retirement, citing sources, and said that former Gov. Brian Schweitzer could seek the Democratic nomination.

Baucus was one of only four Democrats to vote against the bipartisan gun bill last week. All are from states that backed Republican Mitt Romney for president, and Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas face re-election next year. The fourth Democrat to vote against the measure, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, is in her first term.

While Montana voted overwhemingly for Romney, it has a history of electing Democrats to statewide seats. Schweitzer, a popular former two-term governor, would likely be a formidable opponent for any Republican. He told the Great Falls Tribune on Tuesday that he would not rule out running.

The state's other senator, Democrat Jon Tester, won re-election last year, and Democrats have won three straight governor's races.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement:

"As Montana's Senior Senator and Chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus has shaped and guided legislation and policy affecting every American, and his service has been a benefit to all Montanans. He has been an invaluable leader in our caucus, and he will be sorely missed. Democrats have had a great deal of electoral success in Montana over the last decade, and I am confident that will continue."

People in Boston can speak for themselves. And do. Loudly, bluntly and often with humor that bites.

It's a city that speaks with both its own broad, homebrew, local accent — although no one really pahks thea cah in Havahd Yahd — and dialects from around the world. It is home to some of America's oldest founding families, and fathers, mothers and children who have just arrived from Jamaica, Ireland, Bangladesh and Ghana.

There are people in Boston who dress in pinstripes and tweeds, and tattoos and spiked hair. Sometimes, they are even the same person.

It has a history of hard racial attitudes and professed liberal politics, lots of Nobel laureates and, historically, more than a few ignoble pols. It's the city of splendidly posh museums and tightly-packed neighborhoods, where people know how to batten down doors against storms, get snow off the streets and keep going.

You could see a big streak of Boston when Mayor Tom Menino stood up to speak at this week's prayer service. He had just signed himself out of the hospital where he was recovering after surgery. The mayor still had a hospital bracelet strapped around his wrist. He had hospital machines that kept him going, cloaked by a sheet on his lap and he was steered to the podium by his son, a Boston police officer, who had been at the finish line of the marathon.

But the mayor of Boston insisted on getting out of his seat to stand at the podium and tell his city in a hoarse, husky voice that crackled like the wheels of one of Boston's T trains when he said, "We are one Boston."

This week's assault and tragedies in Boston could have caused scrambling, fright and panic. Instead, they revealed character. People ran unflinchingly into smoke, fire and blood. They worked through weariness, opened their arms and gave of their hearts.

Friday night, I got an email from my friend Gordon. He works in a restaurant and opened the doors so people from the race could stumble in for shelter and comfort. Friends who run a family bakery nearby came in crying.

"It will be some time before my anger subsides," Gordon said. The restaurant, which is usually bright and loud with laughter, has been quiet and somber. "Boston's characteristic cocky humor is taking a backseat," he said, but adds, "I was struck by the calm, serious resolve not to be intimidated. Boston is a tough, smart, proud town. We know what's important ... Bostonians refuse to lose our trust for one another."

And when police arrested the 19-year-old suspect Friday night, Boston ended a week that opened with a vicious crime of violence with an act of justice.

Monday kicks off US VegWeek 2013, a campaign by Compassion Over Killing that invites people to go vegetarian for a week "to explore a wide variety of meat-free foods and discover the many benefits of vegetarian eating—for our health, the planet, and animals."

VegWeek got its start in 2009, with Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin (D) committing to a week of meat-free dining. This year dozens of other legislators and community leaders are following suit, with representatives from Arizona, Texas, and California, among others, making 7-day VegPledges to go veggie from April 22-28.

Sen. Raskin's week-long pledge has stretched to years, a move that he describes as aligning his morals with his menu. But achieving this alignment is a struggle for many omnivores. On the one hand, they don't enjoy harming animals. But on the other, they do enjoy the taste of meat. These inconsistent beliefs lead to what psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian call a meat paradox: "people simultaneously dislike hurting animals and like eating meat."

One response to this paradox is that of Sen. Raskin: change your menu to match your morals by embracing a vegetarian or vegan diet. [Full disclosure: I'm also vegetarian.] But another response is to change your moral or factual beliefs in a way that renders meat eating less problematic. If you believe that cows are essentially mindless, for example, then eating them and supporting factory farming might not be quite so objectionable. Right?

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that people do adapt their morals to their menu, whether or not they realize they're doing so. In a 2010 study by Loughnan, Haslam and Bastian, for example, meat-eating university students were randomly assigned to consume either beef jerky or cashew nuts. In a subsequent task — presented as unrelated — participants indicated which of 27 animals (snails, cows, gorillas, etc.) they felt "morally obligated to show concern for."

The researchers reasoned that eating beef jerky would force participants to confront the meat paradox head on, leading to greater cognitive dissonance and the denial of moral status to non-human animals. That's precisely what they found. The beef-eaters identified an average of 13.5 of the 27 animals as worthy of moral concern; the cashew-eaters came in at a significantly higher 17.3.

Additional research has found that people ascribe a more impoverished mental life to cows and to sheep when they're told that they will later be eating beef or lamb. The same is true when people learn that particular cows and sheep will "be taken to an abattoir, killed, butchered, and sent to supermarkets as meat products for humans."

Researchers have also found that animals categorized as food are ascribed reduced capacity to suffer, whether or not humans are responsible for the killing. And that's not all. Another study reports that omnivores are less likely than vegetarians to attribute emotions like love, hope, and melancholy to (edible) pigs, but not to dogs.

Two of the leaders in this field of research, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian, were kind enough to correspond with me by e-mail about their findings. Haslam explained how this work emerged from more general questions about human judgments and social groups:

My colleagues and I had been pursuing a line of research on dehumanization and were thinking about different groups that might be denied human qualities. We realized that this process of denial might occur with non-human targets. You couldn't say that a non-human animal had been "dehumanized", of course, but you could say that it had been distanced from humanity by a process that's directly analogous to dehumanization: denying that animal emotions, thoughts, and moral worth. Sure enough, we found that people were especially likely to deny human-like qualities to animals that they eat, and that they deny animals these qualities especially when they contemplate eating them or are in the process of eating them. This pattern is just what you see in the dehumanization of social groups: we view some other people as less than human and do this especially when we aggress against them.