Have Republicans made an historic decision to back global hegemony over liberty in the wake of 9/11? Here's Greenwald:
There is an orthodoxy of militarism to which major political figures in both parties feel compelled to pay homage notwithstanding the fact that such orthodoxies are opposed by large numbers of Americans (Chris Floyd regularly documents this dynamic as well as anyone). And any questioning of those orthodoxies single-handedly removes one from the mainstream (see e.g., Ron Paul and Mike Gravel). But what are emerging as the defining principles of the Republican Party go far beyond a mere belief that the U.S. should maintain global military hegemony in the Middle East and around the world.
Here's Jim Henley:
This isn't quite right. Rather, the Republican Party is just definitively embracing the moral costs of maintaining global military hegemony. From the 1930s to the 1990s, paleoconservative critics and their counterparts on the left worried that militarism and interventionism were inevitably corrupting of republican (small-r) principles, that there was no nice way to rule the world, that the United States would have to choose between hegemony and liberty. All the Republican Party base and its candidates are doing is finally making a choice that, thanks to the bipartisan orthodoxy, always loomed.