Maybe having their noses rubbed in it this week will shake New Democrats out of their shell-shocked torpor. Maybe having to watch the glamourous Justin Trudeau promenading with his entourage up the tree-lined entrance to Rideau Hall in the glorious autumn sunshine will shake the NDP out of its weird catatonia.

Then again, maybe not. It’s been more than two weeks since Canadians gifted Trudeau with the grand electoral victory that New Democrats had convinced themselves was rightfully theirs, and there is still no sign that anyone in the vote-ravaged ranks of the NDP leadership is capable of even wondering out loud: What the hell happened?

There is no sign of methodical evaluation, serious self-criticism, or intelligent life. Instead, there is a kind of paralysis, a going-through of motions, as though having been reduced from Official Opposition and government-in-waiting to third-party House of Commons rump was such a blow as to have triggered a kind of collective psychotic episode. It was evident the moment polls closed October 19.

After losing her own race to a Liberal in Trinity-Spadina, in a country-wide debacle that reduced the NDP to 44 out of 338 House of Commons seats and cut the party’s Parliamentary caucus nearly in half, NDP grandee Olivia Chow, widow of NDP saint-prophet Jack Layton, set the tone this way: “Together, we continue to build our dreams, we continue to move forward.” As if by diktat, this strange state of denial was entrenched as the official party line almost immediately, in the words of Anne McGrath, the NDP’s election campaign director: “I think we emerged from this with a lot of hope for where we can go from here … we have a lot of opportunity going forward.”

It was not just with a straight face but with a beaming smile that Brad Lavigne, principal campaign adviser to NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, attributed the Liberal defeat of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to Mulcair himself. “This was certainly going to be an election about change. And Mr. Mulcair was a big part of that. He paved the way with the prosecution of Mr. Harper in the last number of years in the House of Commons and in the first number of weeks in this campaign.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a catastrophic election defeat is not what one would ordinarily characterize as a continuation of forward movement. Coming to such grief on a keel-breaking shoal while Mulcair himself was at the helm wouldn’t normally earn a commendation from the admiralty for expert party-leader navigation. But this is the NDP we’re talking about here.

Mulcair says he plans to stick around for the long-term. Party brass describe him as fit and ready to fight another election four years from now. The NDP constitution requires a leadership review at the NDP convention in Edmonton next year, and if delegates want a leadership race they can say so in a secret-ballot vote.

But the questions that need answers aren’t just about the party’s leadership or about the cavalcade of error that marked the NDP campaign strategy. New Democrats might start by wondering out loud whether it was such a good idea to present themselves to voters as old-school Red Tories except with a national daycare plan and to attempt to give the appearance that Mulcair was just Joe Clark, only with a weird smile and a beard. But that’s just where the conversation might begin.

It might also be useful for the NDP to be a bit more mindful of its tendency to expend so much effort saying nice things about itself and insisting that the NDP is rightful heir and successor of everything progressive and decent in Canadian politics. It’s a reality-averse NDP habit that rendered the NDP’s reaction to its loss last year at the provincial polls in Ontario — for reasons not dissimilar to the NDP’s October rout by Trudeau’s Liberals, country-wide — to the stuff of sidesplitting jokes.

After having triggered an election and the overturning of a Liberal government in which she held the balance of power, only to lead the NDP to third-place ignominy by allowing Liberal Kathleen Wynne to campaign handily and convincingly to the NDP’s left, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Howarth boasted: “I’m proud of the achievements that we’ve made. We were able to connect with a whole bunch of people that decided to vote NDP for the first time ever.” Just not nearly enough people, it turned out.

The way NDP soul-searching tends to unfold, to the extent that it happens at all, is usually along the lines of having to put up with dreary old placard-carriers demanding that the NDP return to its more radical socialist roots, which were never particularly deep or radical to begin with, but it’s folly for a couple of big reasons.

The first is that there isn’t much traction to be had in a program that would require hapless NDP candidates to attempt to charm their way into the affections of the working class by traducing Canada as a racist colonial settler state one minute and demanding a bigger and more intrusive role for the state the next. The second is that the NDP is no longer a working-class party anyway, and hasn’t been for some long while. In a global economy that has efficiently outsourced so much productive labour to the working masses of China, India, and other less-developed countries, there’s not much of a base to be built in the proletariat that radical New Democrats once championed.

Substituting identity politics for class politics is a sordid game that Liberals can play every bit as sharply as the NDP can. Perennial complaints about “false consciousness” notwithstanding, what little is left of Canada’s industrial working class is perfectly comfortable speaking the language of the Conservative Party.

If the NDP wants to persist in the mythology that it is Canada’s national “conscience,” it is going to have to figure out how our conscience should be nagging us about the legacy of a succession of Liberal and Conservative governments that has established Canada, according to the London-based Legatum Insititute’s most recent global rankings, as the freest country in the world and the most tolerant country in the world. Canada is one of the best-governed and most prosperous countries on earth, Legatum concludes, and one of the happiest places in the world for ethnic minorities, besides.

Not that there isn’t a lot of rot and poverty and injustice to contend with in Canada. With commodity prices tanking and the prospects for trade growth under a cloud owing to the global order fraying at the edges, Canada’s prosperity is a lot more precarious than it seems and a strong voice for the working poor and the vulnerable in Ottawa would be a very good thing.

But if the NDP ever wants to actually govern Canada, New Democrats are going to have to decide what they’re for, exactly, and what makes the NDP so different, and so much better, than the Conservatives and the Liberals.

There’s little evidence to suggest that New Democrats are interested in having that sort of a conversation any time soon.