In Monday’s Washington Post, GOP factotum Grover Norquist, who runs an outfit called Americans for Tax Reform, tells the public what conservatives think, and how they can incrementally achieve their program.

Funny thing is, real conservatives don’t think many of the things Norquist says, not least of which is that you can change Washington slowly, by evolution.

Poseurs have hijacked the word “conservative,” and not just when it comes to domestic policy. Internationalist, interventionist foreign policy ideas now travel under the conservative label.

The Norquist epistle is of a piece with the run of “conservative” thinking. Don’t dismantle big government; take it over.

“There are five steps to a single-rate tax: Abolish the death tax (and) … the capital gains tax, expand IRAs … full expensing of business investment … abolish the alternative minimum tax. Put a single rate on the new tax base and you have Steve Forbes and Dick Armey’s flat tax. Each of the Bush tax cuts … moves us toward fundamental tax reform.”

“Conservatives,” he avers, “want to move to a flat-rate income tax for both economic and political reasons.”

Granted, a flat tax would be better than what we have now, but real conservatives would abolish the income tax, not flatten it. This would enable us to dismantle three-quarters of the unconstitutional federal regime. But Norquist, like most of the conservative Beltway philosophes these days, doesn’t discuss the unconstitutional Leviathan.

Then again, the Leviathan is only possible because of the income tax, which is precisely why Norquist’s Republican Party can never contemplate scrapping it. The income tax pays for GOP dreams of “national greatness.”

But let’s go on: “The Founding Fathers,” Historian Norquist writes, “gerrymandered the Senate for Republican control.”

What? Maybe Norquist has been holed up inside the Beltway so long the real history of the Republic has been erased from his head, if anyone ever bothered to pencil it in. The founders did not “gerrymander” the Senate for the GOP. The Republican Party did not exist in 1787.

Real conservatives know and love history. They respect it. They study history and learn from it. The Norquist conservatives don’t bother with it. They mostly study the Washington Times commentary section and the latest “backgrounders” from The Heritage Foundation.

Norquist isn’t the only faux conservative out there.

Others are the boosters of the trumped-up war against Iraq, the one we fought because Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” American troops, by the way, have not found them.

These “conservatives” envision America rolling over Iran and Syria, winning what they call World War IV. They run the Bush Administration, and compose most of the mob of “conservative” newspaper columnists and radio big mouths, from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Charles Krauthammer and the ubiquitous Bill Kristol.

Time was, America did not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; we were well wishers of liberty everywhere, but defenders only of our own. Now, Leviathan destroys monsters from Indiana to Iraq, “imposing” liberty along the way.

And “conservatives” support it.

Some of us weary of Norquist and his “reformist” Mafia telling the world, falsely, what an American conservative is. Maybe it’s time to call ourselves something else, such as Constitutionalists.

But maybe not.

Norquist and Co. can use the name, but it changes nothing about them, and nothing about us.

Syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va.