In 1984 and Brave New World, we saw extremely effective authoritarian governments of different sorts.
While of course elements of those books exist in our structures today, there is one key difference: Western governments, and western elite, are now incompetent. They have inherited a once meritocratic, productive system, and turned it into precisely the opposite.
Despite this, the authoritarian impulses of these fools are increasing. In the U.S. the power of the federal government has correlated precisely with its decreasing competence. Garbage public schools, useless regulations, terrible laws which every citizen violates 5+ of which every day, leading to the dysfunctional anarcho-tyranny which we now live in.
Does anyone know any books or media which actually got this right? I'm guessing maybe cyberpunk/corporatist dystopias?
And you are wildly overestimating their ambitions. They're fat cats, born from an absurd political paradigm, insulated from hardship by Pax Americana, in which the default solution to a problem is "more government." They are no more comic book villains than Roman senators idling away on their Latifundia in the 5th century.
If anything, that makes them far more dangerous.
I think it's a bit of both, tbh. Yes, they are impossibly soft, and born with absolutely no understanding of the natural state of humankind. But they are very good at manipulating said absurd paradigm.