Racism, lying by officials, cracks in the edifice of civil society, widespread stupidity, and the lure of authority—these are among the issues that plagued Hannah Arendt during her years in the United States. Jewish, middle-aged, and displaced from her homeland, the German-born political theorist tried to fathom the collapse of the democracy that had formed her and the dangers within the one she now lived in. Today, her words resonate like never before.

In the early 1950s, when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, you could already feel the sadness and dismay that would engulf her for the remaining decades of her life. Describing the rise of anti-Semitic racism, imperialism, and modern day totalitarianism, she explored the ways in which the “subterranean” dark side of Western culture had “finally come to the surface” in Europe and had turned the mores and laws of Western civilization on their head and “destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of Germany.”

Her concerns are clearly present before us, now, in the United States. Public displays of racism and xenophobia are on the rise. The White House has issued yet another Muslim ban alongside a refugee ban. Anti-Semitic incidents are skyrocketing around the country. Imperialism as well is an unmistakable part of the language of Trump and his administration: “America First,” has become the administration’s policy mantra, along with an escalation in drone strikes, a willingness to alienate long-standing allies including the UK, Germany, Australia and Sweden, and a drum roll to war with North Korea, and maybe Syria. The instability of the nation-state as we know it alongside the rise of transnational groups are eroding political institutions in America, much like the erosion Arendt saw in Germany.

Likely for these reasons, Origins sold out on Amazon and hit bestseller lists the week after Donald Trump was elected. Like Orwell’s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Arendt’s searing portrayal of Germany’s descent into fascism has captured the attention of Americans, worried as many are these days about the sudden brazen, apparently long-suppressed racism and xenophobia rampant in the United States, and the prospect of a revitalized militarized, anti-civil libertarian state under Trump’s leadership.

Although the United States stood out for Arendt as a beacon of hope, she saw vulnerabilities in American-style democracy as well, many of them apparent at the moment of birth. Chief among them was the possibility of an alienated citizenry. In the early years of the new republic, the public space for political dialogue was centralized in the federal government; instead of within the connection to community politics, the new citizens ceded the conversations to their representatives in government. “Isolation may be the beginning of terror,” she wrote in her 1953 essay, “Ideology and Terror”(which she later added as the last chapter of Origins.) “It certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.” While the American Revolution had ensured the freedom of the people, she later wrote, it “failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised.”