Neo-conservatives always try to join their Idealism to Power by riding the wrong horses.

They rode the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon; "freedom fighters" like Angola's Jonas Savimbi or Afghan's Mujahideen; Iran-Contra; anti-Communist dictators Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein -- recall Rumsfeld's handshake -- and the Argentine junta (because, you see, if Communism triumphed, as in the Eastern Bloc, it would never be defeated by its captives). Neo-cons rode Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush themselves rode real horses, so neo-cons rode Reagan and Bush, too.

This year, they tried to ride Giuliani (I helped stop that one) before battening onto poor John McCain. Watching them climb off for now is as painful as watching Americans evacuating Saigon in 1975.

Neo-cons warn that the world is dark and cruel, and they deride liberals for caring more about morality than reality. But neo-cons too often prize a certain deft toughness over intellectual and moral self-respect. For awhile, they even rationalized McCain's choice of Palin as loyally and ingeniously as their psychological forebears, American Stalinists, rationalized the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. (Read David Brooks, "The Palin Rebound.").

Once Palin got going, it took an outraged Ed Koch's endorsement of Obama to shock some neo-cons into thinking, "Maybe there is some stuff I, too, should not eat." Defections to Obama by high conservatives such as George Will and Christopher Buckley embarrassed them a bit more.

Field Marshall William von Kristol stood firm, but, after all, he had served the last Palin-quality vice president -- as Dan Quayle's chief of staff.

Brooks squirmed into the option I predicted, playing the public savant above the battle, appraising the players' strengths and weaknesses. To watch Brooks now, you'd never guess how deep he was in the trenches for Bush against Kerry in 2004. His nice-ish words about Obama today are not an endorsement but an ingratiation: He wants desperately to be taken seriously by Obama, until he starts tearing him apart.

(Brooks is right that Obama's coolness leaves some of us uneasy. When McCain told Obama that he should have run against George W. Bush four years ago, I wondered why Obama didn't respond, coolly, "Well, John, I'm running right now against a man who bear-hugged George W. Bush in 2004. You gave him your highest praise and support, even though his campaign had just smeared you using operatives you've now taken on in your own campaign. You are a continuation of George Bush.")

The latest big neo-con defection to Obama may not even be one: -- today's surprising endorsement by The Washington Post, reported here by Greg Sargent. Editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt usually joins the Post's arch-neo-con ranter, Charles Krauthammer, in a delusional foreign policy.

Has intellectual integrity at the Post editorial page triumphed suddenly over neo-con intrigue? Was Hiatt ordered to endorse Obama by Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, who may have learned a thing or two about the follies of her mother Lally Weymouth's long-time neo-conservatism?

Whatever the case (and I can imagine Hiatt chewing through a few pencils yesterday), today's Post endorsement is almost as critical of Obama as of McCain, even pausing to praise McCain for his heroic past independence before concluding that he has lost his bearings too much to be president. The Post might well have stayed with McCain had he stayed steady at the tiller instead of becoming an unstable, incompetent commander-in-chief of his own campaign.

I've knocked the left often enough for its own hapless efforts to tie idealism to power by riding bad horses. (Read the relevant sections in www.jimsleeper.com). But here's the difference: Conservatives, and even neo-conservatives, are supposed to be attuned to wielding established power because they admire it more than the left does and spend more time in its precincts and on its tab. Since 1980 they've certainly had enough opportunities to wield power to learn something about doing it.

The truth is that neo-conservatives -- unlike today's chastened and, let us hope, wiser liberals -- really are the psychological descendants of American Stalinists. They've carried over the same anti-democratic mental morphology, with its power-hunger and perverse love of toughness; its parched thirst for enemies, at home and abroad, as foils for self-definition; its paranoid, conspiratorial, and Manichaean inclinations.

It is precisely because neo-conservatives aren't really at home in America and don't "get" its civic-republican ethos that they resort to bombastic patriotism, fevered support for war heroism (other people's war heroism) and a national-security state mindset that makes us weaker by the year.

The humiliatingly honor-obsessed neo-con Kagan family is a case in point: Donald, the scholar (and touter) of classical warriors' honor; Frederick, the great American Enterprise Institute proponent of "the surge" in Iraq; and Robert "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" Kagan, the historian of what he proudly called our "Dangerous Nation" in a book by that name. (Lately, Robert seems to be getting a better grip, but only time will tell whether intelligence is a match for obsession.)

Simply but sadly, neo-conservatives don't really understand where a republic's strength comes from, even in battle against truly evil and intriguing foes. Unable to reconcile their yearnings for ordered liberty and bourgeois success with their uncritical obeisance to every whim of the capitalism that's dissolving the values and sovereignty they claim to defend, they try all the harder to ride horses of Power to delusional redemptions.

I find it almost as saddening as maddening to watch John Quixote McCain, so vulnerable to these giddy triumphalists because he shares some of their delusions, stagger along toward his deserved end -- or toward an ignominious and ultimately Pyrrhic victory on Nov. 4.

Power-drunk neo-cons imagine that McCain's shocking incapacity became evident only recently. But I can't forget his falling into George Bush's arms, literally, on that stage in Nevada in 2004. The neo-cons have forgotten it because they were right there on Bush's back at the time, riding him to victory. Who knows what sorry race-horse they'll batten onto now.