ABSTRACT
The legal and political possibilities of the virus, its potential to serve as a fundamental disruption to the constituted order remain real, but are perhaps overwrought in relation to other ‘normal’ states of legal exception. In Brazil, Bolsonaro destroys indigenous populations in the name of economic progress and allows the coronavirus free reign in the favelas. In the United States, Trump used the invasion of “bad hombres” from the south to take military funding to build his wall. Attacks on Roma in every country in the European Union, where their status as gens du voyage poses a threat to sovereignty of the nation state and the pan-European polity at one and the same time, continue unabated. The pandemic simply gives an excuse, and a broader power and authority to governments who wish to use it, to institute long-term anti-democratic reforms that will persist after the exception.
