As usual, Corner readers come through. The comments by Vaclav Havel I was thinking of came from his New Year’s Address in 1990, just after being elected president, including:

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

People perplexed about how we got into today’s immigration mess might replace “totalitarian” with “post-American.”