Most were unified by their defense of authority, tradition, morality, religion, limited government, rule of law, civic nationalism, capitalism, social conservatism, anti-Communism, anti-socialism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism, as well as their skepticism of egalitarianism and democracy and the growing power of Washington.
[2] Above all, Murray Rothbard wrote, the Old Right were unified by opposition to what they saw as the danger of "domestic dictatorship" by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal program.
The new conservative movement later led by William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan adopted much of the domestic anti-New Deal conservatism of the Old Right, but broke with it by demanding free trade and an aggressive, internationalist, interventionist, and anti-communist foreign policy.
Anti-collectivist, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal, passionately committed to limited government, free market economics, and congressional (as opposed to executive) prerogatives, the G.O.P.
[13][14] In his 1986 book Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Robert Nisbet noted the traditional hostility of the right to interventionism and to increases in military expenditure:[15] Of all the misascriptions of the word 'conservative' during the last four years, the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of 'conservative' to the last-named.
For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism.
[17] The Southern Agrarian wing drew on some of the values and anxieties being articulated on the anti-modern right, including the desire to retain the social authority and defend the autonomy of the American states and regions, especially the South.
[19] Paul V. Murphy explains that they "called for a return to the small-scale economy of rural America as a means to preserve the cultural amenities of the society they knew.