LIBERAL-LIBERTARIAN cage fights can be fun, but Sean Wilentz's scattershot attack on Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in this month's New Republic is pretty thin stuff. Fortunately, though, it has served as the pretext for an intriguing essay by Will Wilkinson (a fellow blogger on DiA). Mr Wilkinson wonders why some liberals have begun defending repressive government practices on the grounds that criticising such practices seems too libertarian. (This is a pretty good description of what was wrong with Mr Wilentz's article.) Even if liberals think the libertarian critique of the state is wrong, why would that lead them to defend state actions that liberalism should condemn? "There’s something about the libertarian-liberal dialectic that leads liberals to confuse the identification of the illegitimate, illiberal practices of the actually-existing state with the libertarian argument against the very possibility of [a] legitimate state," Mr Wilkinson writes.

This is an interesting argument, but I think Mr Wilkinson makes a few moves that put the discussion on the wrong foot. First, there's his open-ended reference to the "illiberal practices" of the "actually-existing state". What are we talking about here, exactly? Mr Wilkinson means that the actually-existing security practices of the American state (and many other liberal democracies) are impossible to justify on liberal grounds. We're talking about vast government agencies scooping up electronic information on citizens, lying about it, relying on secret interpretations of the law, while publicly maintaining that they are not doing so, and so forth.

But this rhetorical gesture, moving from the claim that one class of illiberal practices is incompatible with liberalism to a general denial of the legitimacy of (all?) liberal states, is exactly the kind of thing liberals can't stand about libertarians, and it's what makes liberals like Mr Wilentz so uncomfortable at the prospect of agreeing with a libertarian about anything. There are many liberal states that don't engage in such illiberal security practice. Sweden and Canada, for example, aren't carrying out secret drone strikes, or trying to collect every bit of electronic communications in the world and then denying it to their parliaments.

A second problem with Mr Wilkinson's argument is that many liberals actually do denounce the illiberal practices of the American security state, and applaud Mr Snowden as a whistleblower. This is precisely why Mr Wilentz wrote his article: he was annoyed that "effusions of praise for the leakers can also be found throughout the liberal establishment."

The New York Times, which has come to rely on the leakers as prize sources, is now crusading on Snowden’s behalf. Its editorial page has celebrated him for having “done his country a great service” and supports clemency for the crimes he has committed. A stellar array of liberal intellectuals and pundits, from David Bromwich and Robert Kuttner to Richard Cohen and Ezra Klein, have hailed Snowden, as have elected officials, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden. To criticize the leakers, as the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin and a few other writers have done, is to invite moral condemnation.

Many liberals are indeed reluctant to criticise security-state practices, but attitudes are in fact deeply split. Polls show that Democrats are now more likely to support NSA practices than Republicans or independents, but this is overwhelmingly a result of the fact that a Democrat is in the White House. In general, Mr Wilkinson doesn't give enough explanatory power to simple partisan loyalty. When news of massive electronic-surveillance programmes leaked out under George W. Bush, liberals were uniformly outraged. The partisan hypocrisy of failing to condemn such programmes under Mr Obama is not unlike the way conservatives have condemned fiscal stimulus under Mr Obama. It doesn't necessarily signal a deep ideological truth about either political philosophy.

A final objection is more complicated. Liberals recognise that states are justified in engaging in illiberal practices to combat serious threats to their own liberal orders; libertarians acknowledge this too, though they usually set the bar higher. The level of security threat faced by Israel legitimates types of secrecy, surveillance and state violence that would not be legitimate in Sweden. The same goes for Britain during the era of the IRA terror offensives. The threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union legitimated an extensive American espionage apparatus. (In each case, state security organs overshot the level of surveillance, secrecy and repression they actually needed to employ, but few would argue that the correct level was "none".) The American government uses this argument today to legitimise the hugely expanded secret-security apparatus it has created over the past dozen years: it's supposed to be necessary to foil terrorism. David Remnick, in his long article in the New Yorker this week on the state of Barack Obama's presidency, cites the president saying as much during a conversation on drone strikes:

The way I’ve thought about this issue is, I have a solemn duty and responsibility to keep the American people safe. That’s my most important obligation as President and Commander-in-Chief. And there are individuals and groups out there that are intent on killing Americans—killing American civilians, killing American children, blowing up American planes. That’s not speculation. It’s their explicit agenda.

The problem, for liberals angry at the expansion of that security state, is that the terrorist threat to America does not appear to be severe enough to legitimate many of the things American security organisations are now doing. Moreover, many of the measures security organs are taking don't seem to be effective in defeating that threat. Rather, they seem to stem more from an inevitable bureaucratic drive towards greater power and fewer checks.

Libertarians will ask: what did you expect? The state will inevitably try to enhance its own power, which is why we should reflexively try to shrink it. But it's worth looking at why security organs succeed at expanding their reach. It's because politicians fail to check them. And politicians fail to check them because voters will punish any politician who is seen as letting a terrorist attack happen, which leaves few incentives to push back against security-state agencies. Left-leaning politicians are especially susceptible, as they are seen as soft on foreign foes. It may be illiberal, but from a politician's point of view the expansion of the security state is democratically legitimate: this is clearly what the voters want them to do.

Mr Wilkinson closes with a clever turn: if liberals who object to the illiberal security state have "come to seem a little 'libertarian'," he writes, that suggests that "liberalism is effectively a corrupt form of statist institutional conservatism, and that the democratic justificatory ethos of mundane liberalism has somehow survived within the ethos of 'libertarianism,' even if, as an explicit doctrinal matter, libertarians are generally hostile to the ideas of democracy and the legitimate liberal state." Again, I think this makes the mistake of moving quickly from problems with the NSA and CIA to problems with "the liberal state". The phrase "statist institutional conservatism" is itself a bit of a libertarian frame; liberals are less likely to carry their critiques of one government institution over into critiques of all of them. But Mr Wilkinson is right that when liberals, whether because of partisan loyalty or other reasons, fail to voice classic liberal objections to classic illiberal government behaviour, they hollow out their own philosophy and leave the field to be claimed by ideologies that haven't compromised themselves.