Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In the early days of President Biden's tenure, not too long after the Jan. 6 Captiol riot, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) attended a meeting in the Oval Office alongside a group of leading Senate Democrats — one in which he almost "immediately raised the stakes," Jewish Insider writes per Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's upcoming book Peril.

"If we cannot deliver, authoritarianism may be on the march," Sanders told Biden, according to an account of the meeting detailed in Peril. The Vermont senator then argued the party badly needed to pass a major rescue bill and show working-class voters, lured away from the party, that Democrats could change their lives for the better.

"The future of democracy depends on which party is the party of the working class," said Sanders, as paraphrased by Woodward and Costas.

After the meeting, Sanders reportedly turned to his colleagues, invoking the Holocaust and Germany in the 1930s, per Jewish Insider. "Germany was one of the most cultured countries in Europe. One of the most advanced countries. So how could a country of Beethoven, of so many great poets and writers, and Einstein, progress to [barbarism]?"

"How does that happen?" he reportedly wondered. "We have to tackle that question. And it's not easy." Read more at Jewish Insider.