Well, there’s whom the state is supposed to serve and there’s whom they actually do serve. Any state that serves anything but the common good is a tyranny by definition. The US and most countries are globalist oligarchies and so you might say that the state is serving capital in our day and age. However, there is variation in the degree of oligarchic capture of the state and while it is good to reduce this capture, I am not sure I can name a single state in history that wasn’t a tyranny to one degree of another in practice (again, matters of degree). A good way of limiting the totalizing control of oligarchs is through a subsidiarian dispersal of political power. But direct democracy and mob rule are perhaps the worst options. It’s also an illusion because the mob is always just an instrument of power (communists for example mobilized the mobs by whipping jealousy).

I think the best attitude is one which presumes that corruption is an inevitable and endemic feature of all human societies and that while we can deal with some or much of it in small ways as these things occur, there is no solution. The belief in a solution ultimately leads to far worse things. Don’t immanentize the eschaton.