Why is saying "reactionary" meant to carry the weight of an insult? It's no more objectively good or bad than "conservative", "radical", or "liberal".
A conservative wants to keep things as they are while reactionaries want to return to a past that rarely is as good as they imagine it to have been and even more rarely is the actual past.
So in other words, the Republican Party is not in any way a conservative party.
Reagan and Thatcher rather corrupted the term "conservative".
Eh, I wouldn't apply reactionary to them though. They're more right-liberal than anything else. Besides reactionaries aren't exactly known for their love of bourgeois capitalism.
"The communist hates capitalism with the Oedipus complex.The reactionary views it only with xenophobia." - Don Colacho