The Last Night in Heaven

by Anika Jade Levy

This essay appears in Issue 1 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Figure 1. An image posted at various times by multiple online accounts associated with Angelicism

Angelicism

Substack

Angelicism01, a pseudonymous Substack entity—commonly mistaken for a bot, a pack of feral incels, or the writer Honor Levy—first appeared on the internet in November of 2020 in a post titled “A Portrait of Donald Trump.”

1. Life under Trump is the realisation that Life under Trump is better than life under capitalism and that life under capitalism is better than any other life and that there literally is no communism.

2. You hate Trump because you can’t stand how beautiful the contemporary world is.

Angelicism’s debut announces two components of its gospel:

1. For the purpose of this project, Trump would be treated not as only as a politician, but also as a spiritual and literary force, a practitioner of hyperstition,¹ or at the very least: the most important poet in America._

2. There is no use in trying to distinguish morality from aesthetics. The beautiful is the good. Irony, opacity, and detachment are deployed not as a defense against, but as an enthusiasm for ultramodern life.

This early lionization of Trump points to a direct line of influence. Angelicism itself is Trumpian in its deployment of unhinged political speech, its endless appetite for self-mythology and neologisms. Both Angelicism and Trump seem to exist outside the simulation that constitutes our global order. Both Angelicism and Trump understand that memes can provide a useful compression of theory. Trump’s irony is sunny and inflected with the power of positive thinking. But the Angelist ideology transcends irony.