In his concession speech last Monday night, Liberal leader Kevin Taft found himself appealing to the imagination of his supporters, if not their better judgment: “We fought the best campaign we could fight, and achieved more than we see in these results. We won’t know the true value of the work we’ve done for years, but it is real.”

Right. One imagines a self-satisfied coterie of Liberals some years hence, slapping one another on the back while reflecting upon the great triumph that was the 2008 election. Today, the loss of seven seats and a substantial percentage of the popular vote might seem a rather dubious achievement, but the “real” value of Taft’s handiwork will emerge in due course.

Taft’s comments are optimistic in more than one sense, for his appeal to historical perspective silently assumes the continued existence of the Alberta Liberal party itself. A safe assumption, you might say: in all likelihood, we can look forward to not voting for a Liberal party in Alberta for as long as there is a Liberal party in Ottawa — which is to say, forever. What isn’t so clear is why this should be the case.

After all, Taft’s invisible achievements benefit no one more directly than the Tories themselves, which poses an existential question to members of the Alberta Liberals. What is the party meant to do? Some political outfits, such as the federal Bloc and New Democrat parties, are animated by particular narratives of opposition. While incapable of actually forming a government, they do effectively represent certain core interests of their constituents. This oppositional narrative does not comfortably mesh with the Liberal ethos. Not only are the Liberals ineffective when it comes to standing up for special interests, Liberals generally tend to be unsatisfied with this oppositional role: they like to think they can win. However, after having achieved the height of their popularity in about 1909 — slightly less than a century ago — the Liberals have gone on to lose 23 elections and counting. How many more chances do they get?

The history of this province is littered with the carcasses of failed political parties, some of whom thrived in their day: the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) governed for 15 years (nothing to sneeze at, even in Alberta) before dissolving its political wing, while the Social Credit party ruled for 36 years before it was obliterated by Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives in 1971. Other parties vanished without leaving much of a mark, their names all but forgotten by the Albertan political mind: the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the Labour Progressive party, the Alberta Unitary Movement, the Western Concept Party. Why are some parties cast onto the garbage heap of history, while others are allowed to muddle along interminably, apparently stuck in the same old morass of mediocrity?

There is no particular set of factors that leads to the abandonment of a political brand name. In the case of the UFA, the party’s reputation was ruined by a sex scandal involving premier John Brownlee. The Social Credit party had failed to adapt to the urbanization of the province, and its organization gradually atrophied. Other parties simply keeled over after extended periods of failure. Individual donors, volunteers and wannabe MLAs eventually tire of giving their time and money to an organization that brings them round after round of disappointment.

In the wake of last Monday’s disgraceful performance, Liberals will find themselves faced with examining their policies, their leader and their brand. When they reach the unavoidable conclusions — that it’s impossible to imagine a concrete set of policy shifts that would have swung the election in their favour, and that it is equally implausible that there is a potential leader out there who is charismatic and persuasive enough to compel a majority of Albertans to buy into a Liberal future — then, they are left with the issue of branding. The depressing reality is that Liberals are selling a product that Albertans haven’t wanted for generations.

Ed Stelmach profited handsomely from this branding crisis, invoking it explicitly throughout the campaign. On February 20, for instance, he railed against the Trudeau Liberals’ “government-planned economy” in order to stigmatize Taft’s party. Whether or not Stelmach’s crude tactic worked is beside the point, because the job has long been done. Conventional mythology may state that the Albertan animosity toward the Liberals grew out of our virulent opposition to the National Energy Program in the 1970s, but in reality, the Libs had already been out of the game for five decades by the time Trudeau birthed that hated policy.

There is no shortage of Liberal excuses (the structural absurdities of the first-past-the-post system, Tory hegemony, etc.), however, blaming the electorate and the institutions will not further the Liberal cause. This is the unavoidable fact that simply will not go away: the Liberal brand is dead.

The Liberals are telling themselves that, if only they work hard enough, if only they elect the right leader, things will be different in four years. They must be made to understand that this preposterous delusion is pernicious to the emergence of any serious political opposition in the province. No group has more to gain from the continued existence of the Liberal party than the Tories.

Unlike the imperishable flames of their former leaders, whose names (Ernest Manning, William Aberhart, et al.) will adorn the lintels of high schools and libraries and various other governmental offices and orifices in perpetuity, political parties in this province have no claim to immortality. They die out, some more gracefully than others. It is high time that the Liberals were reminded of this fact, in one way or another.