Just over a year out from Canada’s next federal election, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, well ahead in the polls, is leaning into the ridiculous tradition of labeling political opponents “communists.” This tactic has a long history — starting with the Duke of Wellington painting his opponents as “radicals” in the early nineteenth century, continuing through the Red Scare hysteria, and reaching its peak with McCarthy-era fears of communism lurking everywhere. Following in this tradition, Poilievre has taken to calling his political opponents “wackos” and decrying the dangers of communism and socialism, neither of which he seems to understand. But understanding, of course, isn’t the point.

Last week, Poilievre took a shot at Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau on Twitter/X. Linking to the Conservative Party website, Poilievre wrote, “Sign here to have a Prime Minister who doesn’t admire basic communist dictatorships” above an image featuring a picture of Karl Marx along with the words “how to do communism.”

The origin of the jab is a 2013 quotation from Trudeau, in which he expressed admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship,” saying it “is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.”

In June, Poilievre took a shot at Trudeau after the government sent a patrol ship to Cuba at the invitation of the Cuban government to celebrate the long-standing bilateral relationship between Canada and Cuba. Poilievre called the move “reckless, radical & dangerous,” noting with horror that the Canadian vessel was sharing anchorage with a Russian ship. For anyone who was disinclined to think about the matter for more than two seconds, Poilievre likely persuaded them that it was proof the prime minister “wasn’t kidding when he said he admires communist dictatorships.”

The latest image shared by Poilievre depicts a cycle with a series of arrows in a circle, starting with “rob or kill the successful,” followed by “force the rest to work for free,” then “run out of food,” “starve to death,” “say it wasn’t ‘real’ communism,” and finally, “establish a new communist utopia.”

If Poilievre has ever read a book, it evidently wasn’t a history book or political theory text. Perhaps he’s read Ayn Rand’s catalog or Friedrich Hayek, or at least the CliffsNotes, but his trolling doesn’t indicate any deep understanding of the nineteenth or twentieth century or the political ideologies that shaped them. Indeed, it doesn’t indicate much of an understanding of Trudeau and the Liberals, either.

Trudeau is the direct descendant of the sort of Liberal that Marx warned about. Trudeau does his party’s name proud. He may be a progressive liberal, but he believes in capitalism and the free market, globalism, and the necessity of private ownership and capital at home and across borders. Trudeau’s radicalism, such as it is, hews strictly to social issues, not economic ones. To the extent that Trudeau ever discusses class, it is only in bromides about the need for a strong middle class; it is not about class antagonisms. If Trudeau were even a social democrat, Canada’s political landscape would look very different than it currently does.

Several Liberal programs and policies under Trudeau, whatever their drawbacks, have achieved some genuine good. These include the Canada Child Benefit, carbon pricing, dental care, pharmacare, and even a federal antiscab law. But none of these are designed with a view toward replacing capitalism; instead, they aim to uphold it. Moreover, many of the more progressive Liberal initiatives have been driven, or at least shaped, by their supply and confidence agreement with the social democratic New Democratic Party.

The Liberal strategy under Trudeau is an old strategy. It’s not structurally transformative. It’s closer to a renovation than a teardown. The idea that it’s communist is laughable.

In the nineteenth century, conservative Prussian premier Otto von Bismarck implemented social welfare programs — such as health insurance, accident insurance, and pensions — as a way to stabilize the existing capitalist order. Almost more importantly, these programs were also a way to mitigate against the appeal of socialism and to impede its rise. Bismarck recognized then what many leaders, conservative and liberal alike, have recognized since: upholding the current order in the face of those who press for structural change often requires giving the people a semblance of the alternative.

Vladimir Lenin, who led the creation of a communist state in Russia, might have had even more contempt for liberals than Marx. Lenin viewed liberals as power-hungry bourgeois tools of capital and barriers to radical change, rather than potential allies. He believed that liberals would never foster and support a mass movement designed to uproot exploitation and injustice. Instead, they aim to create a state that presents a veneer of a gentler, legalist order ostensibly better for the masses, but one that keeps them in servitude.

In Two Utopias, Lenin explores the contradictions and underlying motivations of European liberals in the context of prerevolutionary society. “The liberal bourgeoisie in general,” he writes, “and the liberal-bourgeois intelligentsia in particular, cannot but strive for liberty and legality, since without these the domination of the bourgeoisie is incomplete, is neither undivided nor guaranteed.”

Lenin points out that liberalism often reflects a fear of the masses getting out of control, which drives their efforts to manage state and market contradictions with progressive policy and programs. He observes that “the bourgeoisie is more afraid of the movement of the masses than of reaction.” This fear, he argues, leads to an “endless series of equivocations, falsehoods, hypocrisies and cowardly evasions” in the policy of liberals, who must appear democratic to win mass support while remaining fundamentally antidemocratic and hostile to mass movements.

The Liberals’ slow and plodding record on climate change, while preferable to the Conservative alternative, speaks to what Lenin warned of. While the planet cooks, the Liberals have been slow in creating an effective climate plan.

Writing in the Breach in 2021, Martin Lukacs argued that the Trudeau government, for all its pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change, was a servant of the Alberta “tar sands barons.” The climate policies Trudeau passed, he argues, “were rooted in incremental, market-based approaches that centrist Liberal politicians — and, it would turn out, the corporate lobby — had embraced.”

On climate policy, suggests Lukacs, Trudeau is closer to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper than his supporters would care to admit. “Trudeau did not differ from Harper over his support for the tar sands — he simply questioned the methods by which he had promoted them,” he argues.

Invoking Marx in relation to Trudeau is silly to say the least. It betrays a conservative childishness and Poilievre’s simplistic understanding of both liberalism and communism. Trudeau is ideologically closer to Poilievre than to Marx, and it’s not even close. But Poilievre is a politician, a cynical one at that, and his goal is to flatten, obscure, mislead, and misunderstand in the service of winning — and keeping — power. That’s an affinity he shares, no doubt, with more than a few of the politicians across the aisle he spends so much time attacking.