Rigging is only for politicians who are not white males in the white male party, the GOP.
Rigging is only for politicians who are not white males in the white male party, the GOP. Joseph Sohm/shutterstock.com

If Donald Trump was only 100,000 votes from winning three significant swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—best believe the presidential race would be with us today and maybe for a month or so more. He would not have conceded but attacked Clinton's victory with every available weapon. We know he would he have done this because he warned America that he would do it, he would not accept losing. It wasn't an option for him.

Many will discount Trump's brazen determination as consistent with his unconventional style. He just does and says crazy things. But the truth is, conventional and non-conventional GOP candidates have this mindset in common: What is not optional is losing, what is optional is how you win, dirty or clean. The thing that matters for them isn't what the voters want, but that you beat your opponent. At this moment, the GOP governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, refuses to accept his loss to Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat. McCrory and his party is turning the whole state upside down to not be what he is, the loser. What McCrory is doing now is what Trump exactly would have done if he was in Clinton's sorry situation. And if McCrory gets his way, the voter suppression that certainly helped Trump win the state and made McCrory's race close will not lose its force in the coming elections.

But what we must ask is: Why are Clinton, and Obama, not like Trump or McCrory? Why did she concede automatically? And why will she not challenge the results? There is only one answer, and it has to do with with the interesting fact that patriotism has two meanings in America.

Now, one could say (and see) that Trump or McCory have no problem talking about rigging and fraud and corruption in the voter system because they are on the side of American patriotism. It is a given that the right is patriotic. The left, even neoliberal Democrats, must, on the other hand, demonstrate their patriotism, because not to be on the right is automatically un-American. Hillary Clinton's patriotism, therefore, is always in doubt, which is why she always has to make a huge show of it: "I killed Osama bin Laden!" Trump, on the other hand, does not. But this begs another and more important question: What does it mean to be patriotic in the US? Why can a pussy grabber and draft dodger be patriotic and a person who actually helped kill a known America-hating terrorist not so much so?

If we think about this more deeply and darkly, we will have to conclude that American patriotism is not really about being patriotic (loving your country). This is what keeps fucking up moderate Dems every time: they really cling to the belief that being patriotic is about loving the land and people of their country. But if that were the case, then Trump would not be the president-elect. This fact alone revealed what patriotism actually means in the US: not loving your country but loving the power of white men. If you are black, or a woman, and stop ISIS dead in its tracks, it will not make you patriotic in the American sense. If you really love your country, you must above all love the power of white men. This is what the GOP comes down to. Mainstream Dems have operated with the wrong idea of patriotism, and this bad way of thinking contributed to Hillary Clinton's loss. (Her campaign thought the winning solution for the race was convincing moderates and hicks that she really is loyal to the country—land and people—itself.) But the Khans made it very clear that even the greatest sacrifice is not enough. The Khans and their son's life will now be tossed into the dustbin of history because they didn't totally love the power of men who look like, and are in the class of, Trump.

This is straight talk. Clinton cannot and will not challenge the results of the election because that would be unpatriotic in the Dem, and therefore the weaker, sense.