“THE POLITICS OF DELUSION: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s radical dreams are leading straight to chaos,” Myron Magnet Writes at City Journal, along with a fascinating glimpse of how de Blasio’s punitive socialist worldview was formed:

To call de Blasio a self-made man would be a charitable way of putting it. More accurately, he is a made-up man. Born Warren Wilhelm, Jr., he painfully watched his Loomis- and Yale-educated war-hero father decline into anger, depression, and drunkenness after he lost his federal budget-analyst job in the wake of a congressional probe into his and his wife’s left-wing politics. Sparked by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, who’d known the couple as fellow Time magazine staffers before the war, the investigation cleared both Wilhelms of being Communists but noted their “sympathetic interest in Communism,” which cost de Blasio’s father his security clearance, even though he had shown ample proof of patriotism by giving part of his leg for his country at the Battle of Okinawa, for which he won the Bronze Star. So, despite going on to prestigious posts as a Texaco economist and an Arthur D. Little management consultant, he couldn’t let go of the grievance of being a target of McCarthyism. He destroyed his marriage when his son was only seven, ultimately got fired, and put a bullet through his heart in 1979.

“I have a real respect, and a real anger and sadness at the same time,” said de Blasio, trying to describe his feelings about his father to the New York Times. “I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do the math on exactly what it all means.” So wounded was he by the triple abandonment of alcoholic stupor, divorce, and then suicide that he junked his father’s name and took his Smith-graduate mother’s maiden name. Returning as a Sandinista-booster from a Nicaraguan trip after NYU and then Columbia graduate school, de Blasio brought his angry radicalism with him when he joined the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, whose placidly feckless Leftism might have seemed tamer than his 33-year-old aide had hoped.

Earlier this year, in a piece titled “California Is So Over,” on Jerry Brown’s mismanagement of California’s resources, and how the state is becoming “feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior,” Joel Kotkin wrote that “Brown has waged a kind of Oedipal struggle against his father’s legacy” of gubernatorial competency. (At least when compared to Jerry.) Similarly, as we noted earlier this week, a new documentary is making the rounds titled The Brainwashing of My Dad.

See, dad was once a “nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat,” or as Mark Hemingway writes at the Federalist, “In other words, he supported the Catholic pro-life guy who slashed marginal tax rates, fought the commies aggressively, and would otherwise be a completely unwelcome figure among today’s liberals, both culturally and politically.” Dad now finds his worldview being reinforced not by today’s Democrats (see also: Bill de Blasio and Jerry Brown) but by Rush Limbaugh, the late Bob Grant, and Fox News — hence the “brainwashing.” Exploring the Hollywood of the 1970s, Easy Riders/Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind documents the troubled relationships that the simultaneously New Left/new Hollywood Young Turks of that era had with their fathers, even to the point of writing that “parricide” is one of the key leitmotifs that runs through many of the greatest films of that era.

Hatred of what seems like mom and dad’s provincialism really does seem to be a recurring theme to explain away one’s move to the far left side of the aisle, doesn’t it?