I used to devour NR back in the Reagan years and I just don’t remember anything along that line.
Buckley wasn’t unrealistic... he was a political realist when it came to Reagan’s ability to deliver- Reagan had to deal with a Democratic House and the usual band of GOP princes in the Senate. Most NR writers were of that sort, not expecting the impossible.
One complaint that I do recall was Reagan not closing down Carter’s Department of Education, one of his campaign goals. I don’t remember why he didn’t pull that off but it may have been because some GOP Senators wanted to keep it. Or it may have been a trade-off with Tip O’Neill for some goal Reagan knew was more important.
In the Reagan years we didn’t yet suffer from the plague of Celebrity Media Conservatives who have no real jobs other than promoting themselves. Most of the writers back then were doing it as a sideline. Will might have been a sign of things to come.
Yeah , I remember seeing pictures of Reagan and Buckley together.
But Buckley fell short of hitting the bullseye about America’s problems and solutions IMO. I liked Buckley and thought he was intelligent and witty. But sometimes I felt like he got a bit tangled up in his own witty verbosity.
What really shined the light on that for me was Buckley’s discussions with Milton Friedman. IMO, Milton Friedman, who self-admittedly made mistakes himself along the way, had his finger on the pulse of the real issues facing America: the value of individual freedom and the threat of way too much government interference and coercion. Buckley seemed a bit flummoxed by all of that. For instance, Buckley, as so many “conservatives” seem to, seemed to have a hard time in his discussions with Friedman embracing the concepts and value of the market economy free from government interference (ie. NO socialism).