Cher has been a Democrat for about as long as she has been famous, which is to say a very long time. But the singer says the party she knows has changed, and the new version frightens the living daylights out of her.
In a candid conversation with friends that quickly made its way around Los Angeles, Cher said she still believes in many of the causes she has championed for decades. She just can’t follow the party where it seems to be heading.
“Green energy, progressive ideas, I’m on board with all that,” she reportedly said. “But communism? Has everyone forgotten the Cold War?”
For someone who has spent years firing off political posts at all hours of the night, it was a surprisingly calm moment. People who were there say she was not angry so much as rattled. She talked about growing up with duck-and-cover drills, about watching the Berlin Wall come down on television, and about how strange it feels to hear young politicians speak fondly of the very systems that wall was built to protect.
“She’s not switching teams,” said Alex Bruno, a longtime industry friend. “She’s just tired of being told that being scared of Marxism makes her a bad person. She remembers what it looked like. A lot of these kids don’t.”
Cher says she will keep backing candidates who talk sense, no matter what party they belong to. That alone is a big statement from a woman who has been a fixture at Democratic fundraisers since the days of shoulder pads and big hair. Friends say she has already started looking more closely at local races, paying attention to the person instead of the letter next to their name. One friend said she now reads candidate websites the way other people read recipes.
She is far from alone. Across the country, a growing crowd of longtime Democrats say they can’t picture a future with the new crop of politicians who seem more interested in Karl Marx than kitchen-table issues. Many of them are older voters who supported the party through every high and low. They backed unions, civil rights, and environmental protections. What they never signed up for was the idea that the government should own everything and decide everything.
Political consultants say voters like Cher are a warning sign the party would be wise not to ignore. They are loyal, they show up, and they donate. When they start to wonder out loud whether they still belong, it usually means plenty of quieter people are thinking the same thing.
Cher, for her part, is not planning to disappear from politics. If anything, she sounds more engaged than ever. She just wants a party that remembers the difference between progress and a planned economy.
“I can still turn back time,” she joked to one friend. “I just don’t want to turn it back to 1962.” Her representatives did not respond to a request for comment.