The 2004 election framed empire as a contest between force and hegemony

Evidence

During the final round of the 2004 US presidential contest between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, at one point the public debate over their differences came down to competing notions of an empire with no hegemony (for Bush) versus a hegemony with no empire (for Kerry). The issue remained unresolved, but with the re-election of Bush for a second term the question of whether the empire that he was now leading possessed or lacked a dominant ideology persisted. Did he and his vociferous band of neoconservative ideologues have an imperial design for the world based on a hegemonic set of dominant discourses—or did they simply wish to rule with an iron fist, rather than cultivating consent via the velvet glove of a legitimacy? — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 341