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Bernie Sanders is actually more a partner to the Hillary campaign than he is an opponent.

At this point I think it's fair to say that Hillary essentially owns the DNC or that the DNC is so bought into Hillary (as is really the whole informal Democratic party structure) that it amounts to the same thing. I half expect to start getting emails from the Hillary campaign telling me how awesome Bernie Sanders is.

If you want to be arch about it there's a bit of this that reminds me of how things operate in one-party states where there are usually a few official opposition candidates who are harmless and make nominal runs and everyone gets along and goes along. (Wait, don't send your angry emails yet!) I think there's some element of that - Hillary does kind of need and want the Sanders candidacy.

But this sort of embrace of Sanders by the formal party structure as this awesome guy who really fights hard against inequality is also just a loud - perhaps thunderingly loud - tacit recognition that everybody gets where and how this story ends.

Which is what a lot of us picked up on pretty much immediately.  Although, I didn't even think to compare it to a one-party totalitarian regime.  That's dark, Josh Marshall.  But, yeah.

Update: Actually, this.

...it is all fraudulent, all of it, everywhere, up and down, East and West. The movies, radio and state and books and TV — all of them are fraudulent; and the foundations and universities and scholars, they are all fraudulent too; and the executives and the financiers … and the Commissars and the Krushchevs and the Mao Tze-tungs, they are fraudulent equally; it is all a great game; and there are two dangers in this great game: first, the fraudulent people come to believe their own lies, they come to have faith in their fraud; and second, underneath it all, because people are fundamentally good, they come to realize that we live in lies and the people get angrier and angrier and they may explode.

The scenery of politics is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Yet I must report all this as serious. This is the strain on me. That I must be serious, and I must exhaust myself trying to find out what is true and what is fraud and yet, even after I know, I must take them both seriously and write of them both as if I did not know the true distinctions between them.

That's Theodore White, author of the The Making of the President series