It was just a very different time before the Great Recession. The exclusionary, "with us or against us" patriotism that you often see among modern, Trump-era right-wingers very much existed back then, with one key difference: in 2004, it was the mainstream culture. The Dixie Chicks, one of the biggest bands in the world, saw their careers
implode overnight when Natalie Maines dared to speak out against the Iraq War. The
Homeland Security Advisory System was taken seriously, and it never went below "elevated". It was popular to bash France for opposing the war, to the point where
"freedom fries" were briefly a thing. "Support Our Troops" ribbon magnets were on the back of every other car. The NFL started actively cultivating ties with the military in order to position itself as "America's sport". And it touched the nascent internet culture, too. There was a site called
DeadArab.com devoted to memes celebrating the most hawkish elements of the George W. Bush administration and denigrating Arabs and Muslims with every stereotype in the book. Virtually every Flash animation website, from Newgrounds to Stickdeath, was filled with
jingoistic propaganda. Eric S. Raymond, the free and open-source software activist, went off the deep end and became a raging warhawk, penning an
"Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto" that accused all critics of the War on Terror of being useful idiots for al-Qaeda while regurgitating pro-war propaganda calling for attacks on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. This was criticized even at the time, but those who did were either part of the counterculture to begin with, or were marginalized and seen as unpatriotic (see above re: Natalie Maines) until the war started turning into a quagmire. Notice how many politicians today, even within the Republican Party, try to distance themselves from the militarism of the 2000s; it's because, in 2004, the only debate on the Iraq War was whether or not Bush was prosecuting it properly.
On top of that, the Christian Right was still in a position of power. They had their man in the White House, without all of the "yes,
but..." compromises they made with Donald Trump. Abstinence-only sex education was taken seriously rather than seen as a joke, and "ex-gay" conversion therapy wasn't seen as the unremitting horror that it is today. Janet Jackson's career was destroyed by her Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, and Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage led to moral panic; even in 2008, Barack Obama couldn't (no pun intended) publicly come out and support anything more than "civil unions". Teen idols like Britney Spears, Jordin Sparks, and much of the Disney Channel's roster were deeply embedded in abstinence culture; in 2008, Sparks, while presenting an award at the MTV Video Music Awards, gave
a speech defending "purity rings" that was loaded with slut-shaming overtones. The teen comedy
Saved! from 2004 satirizes a lot of this pretty well. The mainstream populist disdain for the super-rich that emerged after the Great Recession was also non-existent. Shows like
The OC,
Laguna Beach,
Gossip Girl, and even
My Super Sweet Sixteen* presented their subjects as people to look up to and emulate, hip-hop music was neck-deep in its "bling era", and Paris Hilton was a legitimate, un-ironic A-list celebrity. The lifestyles of the elite were celebrated as aspirational, and the people who rose from humble beginnings to achieve them were proof that you too could one day do the same if you worked hard enough. The site
Pop Culture Died in 2009 documents how omnipresent a lot of this stuff was in mainstream pop culture.
*(Quite tellingly, at the height of the recession MTV made a series of slasher movies called My Super Psycho Sweet 16
that were basically marketed under the promise of "hey, you wanna see these little rich twerps get what they have comin' to 'em?")
IMO, asking why Bush won in 2004 is a bit like asking why Lyndon B. Johnson won in 1964. Sure, Bush never had the perfect storm against John Kerry that Johnson did against the deeply unpopular Barry Goldwater, but the fundamentals were on the sides of both candidates: the election was held at a time when people thought that the system worked, in the immediate aftermath of a national tragedy that the incumbent was well-positioned to exploit.
