Reactionaries are not conservatives.
The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind.
... the reactionary sees the debris of Paradise drifting past his eyes.
The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.
To live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological change, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution.
Every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody's nostalgia.
When God has invisible behind the world, the things of the world become new gods.
Eric Voegelin
Paraphrased as: "When you abandon the Lord, it is only a matter of time before you start worshiping a Fuhrer."
European Christians got tired of waiting [for the Resurrection]; lacking "the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity", they rebelled and decided to build their paradise on earth, using their own powers. This was how the modern age was born, through a gnostic "immanentization of the Christian eschaton" - that is, the pursuit of the millennium in the political here and now.