Sure, but isn't the argument that the current situation is akin to a frog in a pot? There's no hard threshold under this line of thinking and, I imagine, if so

Sure, but isn't the argument that the current situation is akin to a frog in a pot? There's no hard threshold under this line of thinking and, I imagine, if something terrible were to happen to a vulnerable population abroad, then the west would react in a way which would enable its population to treat the issue as if it were "far away". Rising authoritarianism would just seem like something related to politics in this hypothetical future. From there, any attempts at top-down mitigation would just seem like "bad guys with power doing things bad guys do".