Excuses for Clinton's loss

Let's review the full list of reasons for Hillary Clinton's loss (note that it has to be her loss, since Donald Trump couldn't possibly have defeated her). In no particular order:

• FBI Director James Comey's on-and-off-and-on-again investigations of Hillary. She never actually did anything wrong. It was all his fault, even though sending classified information over an unsecured email is illegal, and ignorance of the law is never an excuse (assuming she was actually ignorant).
• Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's email and then Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's email, in an attempt to swing the election for Trump, because Trump is secretly working for/with Putin. (And people thought the Obama birth certificate conspiracy was wacky!) Of course, nobody ever denied any of the content of those emails.
• Hillary didn't try to get the white middle class vote hard enough. This is actually one of the few excuses which makes sense. This actually falls under the classic truism about generals always tend to fight the last war. She thought she could win with the minority coalition which made Obama successful. However, she was no Obama. For all his failings prior to getting into the White House, Obama never had the many legal and ethical lapses which Clinton caused. 
• "Fake news" caused Hillary to lose. Apparently, many false stories got spread on Facebook and Twitter prior to the election, such as one about the Pope endorsing Trump. Like this doesn't happen every day? The truth is the MSM has lost all credibility, and many of the Wikileaks emails proved just how much they were colluding with Clinton's campaign. When people lose faith in the MSM, they will start looking towards any other news sources, some of which aren't credible. If anything, the MSM's own efforts FOR Hillary worked against them.

Time to add one more to the list: American contrarianism.

Brendan O'Neill suggests this in his Reason editorial, "America Called Bullshit on the Cult of Clinton". As he says:

If you want to see politics based on emotionalism over reason and a borderline-religious devotion to an iconic figure, forget the Trump Army; look instead to the Cult of Clinton.

...By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don't mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine—the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I've come across.

O'Neill proceeds to describe many of these nauseating Hillary cultists, before getting to the meat of his theory:

...What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn't even realize it's doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained...The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.

...the failure to make the gospel of Hillary into the actual book of America points to the one good thing about Trump's victory: a willingness among ordinary people to blaspheme against saints, to reject phony saviors, and to sniff at the new secular religion of hollow progressiveness. The liberal political and media establishment offered the little people a supposedly flawless, Francis-like figure of uncommon goodness, and the little people called bullshit on it. 

Amen.

This actually speaks to the greatest flaw in the Democratic Party, as well as the Left in general. While there are certainly Republicans who view their own party with an almost religious fervor, those Republicans aren't heavily represented in the mainstream media or in educational institutions, which combine to proselytize the secular progressive religion endlessly, creating this cult-like devotion among those whose minds can be swayed away from seeing that their emperor is not dressed. Fortunately, Americans in flyover country rejected this mass delusion.

UPDATE 11/22/2016: I added the "fake news" excuse.