However we may yearn for a politician whose worldview springs straight from his reason, his grasp of history and human nature, and his sense that politics is the art of the possible, not the ideal, what we usually get is a mix of half-baked ideology, hungry ambition, weaselly opportunism, and some inner wound that only the roar of a crowd or the cooing of sycophants can soothe. Even for a politician, though, New York mayor Bill de Blasio is a rare specimen: a self-contrived person spouting an ideology unmoored in reality but inseparable from the man’s brittle sense of himself.

This strange amalgam would be only of local interest were de Blasio not hell-bent on making himself the spokesman for the Democratic Party’s left fringe with a new manifesto: the Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality. Unveiled to raves from the Left on the U.S. Capitol steps in mid-May, the agenda amplifies such familiar far-left tropes as President Barack Obama’s assertion that inequality is “a defining issue of our time”—especially racial inequality, which ex–attorney general Eric Holder devoted his tenure to rooting out, in a quest to uncover racism concealed in every cranny of American life and the American soul, as exposed by the “disparate impact” on blacks of policies not intended to discriminate. How much influence de Blasio and his War on Inequality will have, only time will tell, but multimillionaire presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, that reliably sensitive indicator of which way the Democratic hot air is blowing, now talks the inequality talk. Here in New York, of course, where de Blasio’s approval numbers have hit a new low and crime has spiked not just in ghetto neighborhoods but also on Central Park’s verdant lawns and in Fifth Avenue’s glittering shops, nothing in the mayor’s inequality crusade bodes well.

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.

Read the article “The Bizarre Bill de Blasio and the Death of New York City” on city-journal.org.