Conservatism and the reactionary spirit
Beauchamp opens his book with a discussion of the titular “reactionary” spirit. He makes clear that it is not to be confused with the moderate forms of conservatism which have played a constructive role in modern liberal democracies. Beauchamp notes how the “democratic right” sees “virtue in tradition and danger in change.” Democratic conservatives regard their “core” purpose as being “opposing misguided attempts at social change and enacting reforms that strengthen what’s valuable about the existing political order.” Their aim, as the pithy statement goes, is to change what they must to conserve what they can in the face of reformist calls. Beauchamp even gently chastises some left-commentators on the right like Corey Robin for eliding this distinction and failing to recognize the value of such efforts at conservation.
It's important for Beauchamp not to overstate the case for moderate conservatism. Through the 19th century Burke and many other “moderate” conservatives were often doggedly opposed to what we’d now consider commonsense democratic norms like universal suffrage. In his classic Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity the English conservative James Fitzjames Stephens stressed the “disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage” which was “that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad.”
In the United States William F. Buckley, now lionized by the Never Trumpers, penned columns defending Jim Crow on the basis that whites were the “advanced race” before backtracking. Recognizing these tendencies to vacillate between resisting the tide of egalitarian modernity and accommodating them is necessary when trying to understand why some moderate conservatives like Jonah Goldberg or George Will eventually come out of the closet as right-wing liberals while others tactically or enthusiastically jump into Trump’s lap.
Nonetheless, intelligent liberals and progressives have good reasons to develop what we might call the Burkean virtues of prudence and political empiricism, recognizing that the key test for a nice-sounding theoretical idea is its impact in the real world. Also important is to stress that there is nothing inimical between supporting liberalism and progressivism and supporting and even defending the retention of cultural traditions. Even (perhaps especially) socialists like G. A. Cohen were willing to call themselves “conservatives” about conserving what was of value in our traditions, the environment etc.