In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, just south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a valley called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the ice buildup of a stream that refuses to melt even in the heat of the Gobi summer. But it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk on for more than a mile. A glacier in the Gobi is an eerie anomaly — but no more so than a statue in the city center of Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital.

For 70 years, from 1921 to 1991, Mongolia was a Communist dictatorship, a colony of the Soviet Union. Closed off from the world, it became a hidden sinkhole of despotism ruled by such tyrants as Choibalsan, the Mongolian Stalin. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Empire was Mongolia allowed to shake off the shackles of oppression and become free.

So, free it became, with democratic elections and a surge toward a free-market economy. Yet in a park across from the Ulan Bator Hotel, the city’s largest, there remains a statue of the evil monster who placed Mongolia in chains: Vladimir Lenin. Coming upon a statue — undamaged and pristine — of Lenin in a country free of his depraved legacy is no more palatable than a statue of Hitler in the center of Berlin. Yet there it is, a monument to enslavement that won’t melt in the sunlight of freedom, like a glacier that won’t melt in the Gobi.

One of the most depressing books for an incorrigible optimist like me to read is Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom. I read it decades ago and was scandalized by Fromm’s assertion that most people are afraid of freedom and will reject it even if handed to them on a platter. Fromm would sardonically smile at the spectacle of how so many former Soviet colonies have handled their freedom since it was given to them a decade ago. From Prague and Budapest to Ulan Bator, people free to vote have elected their Communist slavemasters back into power.

Reluctant as I was to admit Fromm’s devastating insight, years ago I opted for American exceptionalism. For Fromm never said everyone by human nature was afraid to be free, just lots of folks were. By offering just that freedom that so many were afraid of, America attracted those who weren’t. So America, at least, wasn’t afraid of freedom, and Fromm was wrong, at least, about America. But like so much else about America that liberals have destroyed, liberals are destroying this too.

By providing welfare programs and government handouts to immigrants — even, or rather especially, to illegal ones — America attracts parasites and not producers. And by spinning a web of fascist anti-competitive rules and regulations, liberals have ensnared the freedom of us all.

I regard liberals as enemies of freedom, who can be relied upon to degrade the institutions and advocates of freedom at every opportunity. They will invariably do their best to invalidate economic freedom with Time magazine cover stories like “Can US Style Capitalism Survive?” and smear the character of a president whose decency and honor are the exact opposite of his predecessor’s.

The essence of Bill Clinton’s character and presidency was irresponsibility. The result was the moral debasement of our culture and the financial debasement of our economy. The latter was a binge the aftermath of which we are now enduring as the Clinton Hangover. Yet folks hate to be told to sober up. It is so much more fun to be irresponsible, to get morally and economically drunk, than to be straight and sober. It is so much easier for liberals to scapegoat capitalism itself, and shift the blame from the perpetrator to his successor trying hard to clean up the mess.

So, will it work? The liberals tirelessly assaulted the abilities of the greatest president of modern times, Ronald Reagan. Yet Reagan triumphed and his historical stature continues to grow. The liberals failed in their attack on Reagan, and I — ever the optimist — believe they will ultimately fail in the attack on George W. Bush.

I also believe they will fail in their current calumny on capitalism. First on general grounds: Not only does capitalism work, it’s the only economic system that does work. Socialism has blindingly failed, and so has every other alternative as well. Second on particular grounds: Every binge has a letdown, and for the extravagance of the former, what we are undergoing now is amazingly mild. It shall pass, and soon.

But soon enough, in time to enable GW’s party to retain the House and regain the Senate this November? No one could claim, given their recent performance, that Republicans are as much friends of freedom, resisting the expansion of government, as the Democrats are the opposite. Nonetheless, Democrat control of the House would be a straightforward disaster for freedom in America.

Freedom in America will always be under threat. Like the glacier in the Gobi, anti-capitalism will not melt away no matter how much the sun of capitalistic prosperity beats down upon it. Like the glacier, it will wax and wane.

In the winter, the Gobi freezes with icy winds blasting from Siberia. The liberals, the Democrats, the anti-capitalists, are making every effort to wax now. Let us hope there are enough people still in America to prove Fromm wrong, enough to ensure that the enemies of freedom and capitalism become little more than an odd curiosity, like a glacier in the Gobi Desert.