The fact we live in a time of empires brutalising the lower classes to death for short-term power in the face of a number of world-scale threats doesn't stop being true just cos the emperors call themselves some other boring thing & use artillery & drones instead of dragons or robots or whatever
We don't live in a realistic world anymore. The sky is turning red in places because their world is on fire; either because of the mass murder of children or because the powers being drawn upon to murder them are killing the only planet we live on. The difference is, in fiction some weirdo would be fistfighting buff Joe Biden atop some symbolic superstructure