Above all, the Old Right were unified by opposition to what they saw as the danger of domestic dictatorship by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and The New Deal program. Most were unified by their defense of natural inequalities, tradition, limited government, and anti-imperialism, as well as their skepticism of democracy and the growing power of Washington. The Old Right typically favored "laissez-faire" classical liberalism; some were business-oriented conservatives; others were ex-radical leftists who moved sharply to the right, such as the novelist John Dos Passos. Still others, such as the Democrat Southern Agrarians, were traditionalists who dreamed of restoring a pre-modern communal society. The Old Right's devotion to anti-imperialism was at odds with the interventionist goal of global democracy, the top-down transformation of local heritage, social and institutional engineering of the political left and some from the modern right-wing.