I know that authoritarian is a lib-brained anti-communist term that one shouldn't use unironically. But what other term would you use to describe those who seems to have a love for the exercise of state violence and coercion for its own sake? The howling hogs who cheer when police beat up protesters, the psychos calling for refugees to be gunned down at the border, the monsters who revel in the misery of the poor and love to step on those who cannot defend themselves.
You could call them rightists or conservatives or something like that but that doesn't carry the appropriate stigma or convey the wickedness of their proclivities. You could also call them fascists which would be correct most of the time but it is too broad a term to center in on their specifically sadistic relationship with state power. It also plays into the liberal idea of fascism being defined by "fascist methods" instead of by fascist ideology and belies the existence of the well-mannered and polite fascists who are the most dangerous kind.
Autocratic, maybe? Tyrannical feels too old-timey and related to the kings of old or whatever, it's something you'd read in a book 200 years ago, and we don't really have tyrants anymore. We don't really have autocrats either as the bourgeoisie as a class really run the show but it's a little better. Totalitarian is also a lib-brained term for when the state does a whole lotta things regardless of whether they're good or bad, like authoritarian.
To be honest, a class of collective tyrants/autocrats isn't really too far-fetched of a concept, even to lib-brained people. You can get across that an unaccountable minority of people ruling over the masses is hardly different than just a single schmuck. Even if they're resistant, you can point out that, yes, even during the heights of Absolutism, the reigning monarch still had to defer power to others.