Why the state can police your tweets, but not your streets
Jacob Reynolds introduces The Academy 2026 and explains why we now have a 'hostile state', incapable of hitherto basic functions but resolutely focused on controlling us.
Jacob Reynolds is convenor of an annual intellectual getaway called The Academy, organised by Ideas Matter. Next year, the event has the theme Hollow Leviathan: The state against the demos. In this essay, Jacob explains why this theme was chosen and what it means to say the state seems to be both all-powerful and utterly incompetent.
The Academy 2026 takes place on Saturday 22 & Sunday 23 August 2026 at Wyboston Lakes, Great North Road, Wyboston, Bedfordshire. Get your tickets for the event here.
Many have become familiar with the increasingly out-of-control censorship ecosystem that has swept across Europe. Over the past three years, more people have been arrested for speech crimes in the UK than in Russia. In Germany, a man’s house was raided for calling a politician an idiot. In Belgium, a far-right activist has been fighting a police investigation for eight years for speech crimes – without the judiciary informing him what he said that caused the investigation.
Indeed, so bad have things got that a whole new class of speech-crime has emerged: where speech is not just criminalised but treated as worse than actual violence. As American officials have recently (and rightly) drawn attention to, a German woman was handed a more substantial sentence for calling a gang-rapist a ‘disgusting pig’ than the rapist she was insulting. Similarly, this year, Elizabeth Kinney, a 34-year-old single mother of four from Merseyside, was assaulted by her former partner. She messaged a friend, describing the attacker as a f****t. Kinney was convicted under the Communications Act 2003 for sending a ‘grossly offensive’ message – yet her attacker was not charged.
At the same time as the speech police spiral out of control, many complain of a breakdown in basic law and order. While Pollyanna himself (Fraser Nelson) insists the UK has become markedly safer in recent years, underneath the official statistics lies a widespread tolerance of low-level criminality and a growth, if not in violence per se, in a previously unimaginable type of gruesome crimes. Even if many of the ‘London has fallen’ accounts are overblown, it is impossible to visit European cities without feeling a creeping sense of perhaps not lawlessness, but at least a certain disintegration of social conduct.
With police prying into social media conduct but distinctly uninterested in the mundane reality of burglaries and thefts, we seem to have reached the point where state power is simultaneously omnipresent and ineffective.
A wider failing
This is not restricted to public safety and street crimes. While European officials are busy telling the population that it is time to ready ourselves for war, they are wildly deficient in military equipment, even down to such basics as bullets. Or take Britain, where officials have been busy announcing their undying support for Ukraine while trying to bury the story of how the Armed Forces’ next generation armoured personnel carrier rattles so much in use that troops are suffering permanent hearing damage. Western countries have announced grand exercises of military-economic power that they have no hope of fulfilling.
Even at a more mundane level, the odd coupling of state power and state impotence is visible. Anyone who has dealt with a local authority will understand that previously core functions such as road maintenance or the repair of schools are beyond the wildest imaginings of local bureaucrats – but just see what happens should you accidentally place recyclable rubbish in the wrong container. Public-health authorities devote incredible resources to re-educating the public on the dangers of certain foods, and yet securing routine medical appointments is a maze of bureaucratic insanity. A very obviously European woman might be quizzed at a midwife appointment about female genital mutilation or forced marriage, and yet an asylum seeker can successfully claim asylum by repeating replying ‘I don’t know’ when quizzed about his identity and circumstances.
The defining paradox of our time
In all the places you want the state to be strong, it is weak, and in all the places you want the state to be weak, it is strong. We are caught in a pincer movement between a state that is terrifyingly intrusive in our private lives and pathetically absent its public duties.
The late political theorist Samuel Francis had a name for this condition: Anarcho-Tyranny.
Anarcho-Tyranny describes a system of government that fails to enforce its own laws against actual criminals (anarchy) while ruthlessly enforcing petty regulations against ordinary, law-abiding citizens (tyranny). It explains why a homeowner can be threatened with fines for putting the wrong recycling bin out, while a drug dealer operates openly on the corner. It explains why the police will visit a journalist’s home for a ‘non-crime hate incident’ but refuse to attend a burglary in progress.
However, this is not a conspiracy; it is ultimately the conjunction of more mundane problems: impotence and anger. The impotence is a symbol of weakness: Western states simply cannot marshal the resources, know-how and buy-in of the population that is required to solve social problems. The anger is the displeasure of the ruling class, which squats over the remains of the decaying state, regarding ordinary people with a mixture of disbelief and disgust.
This modern state is what I call a ‘Hollow Leviathan’. It looks powerful from the outside; it consumes a record share of GDP, employs armies of administrators, and produces mountains of legislation. But inside, the machinery is broken. It has lost the capacity to do the hard things: to build reservoirs, to secure borders, to construct high-speed rail or to keep criminals behind bars.
The hostile state
Because the state is incompetent at the hard tasks, it retreats into the soft tasks. It is difficult to catch a violent gang that has no fixed address and no respect for the law. It is easy, however, to catch a registered taxpayer who tweets under their own name. It is hard to stop knife crime; it is easy to ban ‘harmful’ speech online.
But it is not just incompetence. There is also something malign about the contemporary leviathan. This is what I have termed the ‘hostile state’: the idea that those who control political life are directly hostile to the views, wishes and aspirations of ordinary people. We see this in the logic of the ‘Nudge’ state, which spent the past few years treating the population as a problem to be solved – whether through ULEZ cameras, heat-pump mandates, lockdowns or the Online Safety Act. The assumption is always that the people are dangerous and must be restrained, while the state is virtuous and must be obeyed.
This destroys the most precious resource in a democracy: legitimacy. Political legitimacy is conferred by the demos – the people – as part of a great bargain which sits at the heart of modern states. This is that instead of directly controlling every aspect of our social and political lives, officials, MPs and other public servants are delegated to exercise power for us. In Thomas Hobbes’s great foundational account of this, Leviathan, each of us gives up to the state the right to exercise violence whenever he so chooses in order that a more impersonal operation of the means of violence will give all of us more stability and security.
But Hobbes’s point can be generalised: it is not just safety, security and prosperity that we gain. Modern states are, in theory, capable of delivering on even grander political promises. But they can do this only to the degree that they not only protect the public, but treat us with respect, in fact, with reverence. This power derives from the aspirations of ordinary people – the very aspirations that must be cherished, not belittled, by those in power. When the state breaks this contract, viewing the people not as citizens to be protected but as ‘risk factors’ to be managed, trust evaporates.
This inversion of the social contract is not sustainable. A state that cannot deliver the basics of civilisation cannot demand the allegiance of its citizens.
The Academy 2026
This crisis of competence and legitimacy is the central theme of The Academy 2026, a gathering I am convening to explore the origins of our current malaise. We will be asking the uncomfortable questions that our political class refuses to address: Why is the state, which seems to be growing inexorably, apparently incapable of delivering? Is the state now set explicitly against the people?
Tickets for this event have just gone on sale. Get them here.
The Academy is not just a weekend of stimulating intellectual discussion, including lectures from some of the most exciting thinkers of our times, but also a brilliant and convivial weekend of informal conversation among like-minded people who nonetheless will disagree on many issues. For a flavour of what the event is like, you can check out the lectures from this year’s Academy on our YouTube channel.
If you want to explore why the state is so confident policing speech but so incapable of delivering more basic goods, I really hope to see you at the event. With Christmas around the corner, buying tickets for you and a friend or partner makes a great gift and a commitment to make 2026 an intellectually exciting year. Or just treat yourself.
In any event, now is a great time to get tickets. See you there!