If RichardKennaway's meaning is "ha ha, Azathoth123 is using this as support for a neoreactionary view, when in fact Chesterton had something entirely different in mind" then I don't think that's altogether fair.

Something along those lines. What makes Azathoth123's recent Chesterton quotes rationality quotes? Chesterton wrote:

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

and of course neoreaction is something that is going against a stream, and in its eyes progressivism is, well, I'm not sure how the metaphor works out from here, because what neoreaction is going against is progressivism, which makes progressivism the stream itself, rather than a dead thing floating down some other stream. But anyway, why should we take Chesterton's quote as real wisdom? As a literal statement about the physics of floating bodies, it is true but uninteresting. As a metaphor, he is applying it to Christianity, or to his preferred form of it, everything else being either the stream or the flotsam (the metaphor has the same problem here).

So just what truth is being asserted here, that for Chesterton supports Catholicism and for Azathoth123 supports neoreaction? Contrarianism, the view that the majority is always wrong? That is all the metaphor amounts to. This sits oddly with the contention, also made by neoreactionaries, that their preferred view of society is actually the great stream within which progressivism is a historical anomaly, a trifling eddy that will not last (e.g. Anissimov and advancedatheist in recent comments on LW). I'm sure that if that metaphor had suited Chesterton in making some point, he would have elaborated it at no less length. But a metaphor proves nothing: it is a method of presentation, not of argument.