WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The implosion of Donald Trump’s campaign as he continues to demonstrate that he lacks the temperament to be president has left Hillary Clinton virtually the sole electable candidate in our erstwhile two-party system.

That makes the United States a one-party state, at least for this presidential election, much like Russia, North Korea, China and other antidemocratic nations we look down upon.

As Trump digs his hole deeper, Clinton has wasted no time moving to the center-right where she is most comfortable, embracing neoliberals in the economy and neocons in foreign policy while abandoning the Bernie Sanders progressives who won nearly half the Democratic Party delegates.

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Clinton’s open embrace of controversial Republicans like diplomat John Negroponte and geopolitical strategist Henry Kissinger prompted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to chide Republicans into abandoning any angst over Trump.

“They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office,” Dowd wrote over the weekend, “someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.”

Yes, Republicans have their candidate, she wrote, and her name is Hillary.

Dowd called Clinton “a reliable creature of Wall Street,” whose $10.6 million income in 2015 puts here squarely among the 1%. And she cited Republican strategist Steve Schmidt to the effect that “the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign-policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.”

Progressives are seeing their worst fears realized as Clinton, now that she has fended off Bernie Sanders’s insurgency and secured the Democratic nomination, abandons any pretense of a progressive agenda.

Clinton is casting her net so wide to the center-right that it is blurring any notion of what her mandate would be if she won by the landslide she could reap in doing so.

“If she’s going to get anything done as president, she is going to have to have a mandate,” Robert Reich, a prominent progressive who supported Sanders in the primary, lamented to the Times. She might win over Republican defectors worried about Trump’s temperament, “but temperament doesn’t give you a mandate to do anything,” Reich said.

Progressive commentator Thomas Frank was even more, well, frank, in an op-ed for the Guardian headlined, “With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton.”

“As leading Republicans desert the sinking ship of Trump’s GOP, America’s two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system,” Frank wrote, and that one party has foisted Clinton on us in an undemocratic and corrupted process that “bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession.”

So damaged is Clinton as a candidate that Trump remains competitive in the polls despite his manifest unfitness. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that millennial voters consider this election a “bad joke” because of the choice it poses between two highly flawed candidates.

“Though a few people voiced admiration for Clinton, most talked about both her and Trump in searing, caustic words,” the Post reporters wrote of their interviews with 70-some millennial voters, before listing these caustic descriptions with a literary flourish: “Super villain. Evil. Chameleon. Racist. Criminal. Egomaniac. Narcissist. Sociopath. Liar. Lying cutthroat. Panderer. Word salad. Willy-nilly. Douche. Joker. Troll. Oompa Loompa. Sad. Absurd. Horrifying. Dishonest. Disgusting. Dangerous. Disaster.”

There are of course voters who are genuinely enthusiastic about each candidate — because they like him or her, they like his or her policies, or they like the idea of a woman or an outsider as president.

But Clinton’s favorability rating remains firmly in negative territory, with a double-digit spread of unfavorable over favorable, and Trump’s unfavorable spread is much wider.

Tufts history professor Gary Leupp suggests a massive demonstration in Washington on Inauguration Day to protest the whole sorry process of this election. In the meantime, he recommends simply not voting.

“But why should anybody have to hold their nose while they vote?” he wrote in Counterpunch. “The whole process has been exposed as never before as a farce. Why participate at all in something so corrupt?”

Just to rub it in he compares a vote in these circumstances to North Koreans who patriotically vote in sham elections that result in massive landslides for the Workers’ Party of Korea even though other parties appear on the ballot.

“There is the manicured appearance of multiparty democracy — just like here,” Leupp wrote.

If this all sounds a bit extreme, consider that Trump and Sanders with their antiestablishment insurgencies together got 27 million votes in the primary elections, compared to Clinton’s 17 million. And yet it is the establishment candidate, Clinton, who seems headed for certain victory.

It could still happen that Trump will rebound in the polls — a stunning debate performance could make people forget his personality flaws — or that the polls themselves don’t accurately reflect his level of support.

Third-party candidates Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party are gaining support, and could gain further momentum if they get more exposure.

Presuming, however, that Clinton does win, that victory, Electoral College landslide or no, could result from a plurality of votes cast even as somewhere close to half the eligible voters sit it out, giving her perhaps a quarter of potential votes — hardly a mandate for anything except resignation.

Then the middle class will continue to decline, the economy will continue to languish under the constraints of a misguided neoliberal orthodoxy — and the 1% will grow richer than ever.