Like many Americans, I watched with relief and gratitude as Marie Yovanovitch, the former United States Ambassador to Ukraine, marched through a throng of reporters on Oct. 11 to testify to Congress. Her defiance of a State Department order not to testify was an example of moral courage we have seldom seen among those who have worked for or supported the Trump administration. It was as if the nation had been under a spell, and Yovanovitch broke it. Since then, former and current members of the Trump administration have continued to come forward.

Many of us have wondered, with good reason, whether our apparently anemic system of checks and balances could be completely upended by the willingness of key witnesses to comply with the president’s orders to obstruct Congress. In fact, the notion that the president is above the law, or even worse, that the president’s word is itself a law-above-the-law, seems to be the operative one among Trump partisans in the Office of Legal Counsel and the Congress. What may be less obvious is the connection between this vision of presidential power and toxic masculinity.

As a feminist philosopher, I understand our constitutional crisis to be all tangled up with a specific brand of what I call “sovereign masculinity.” Sovereign masculinity is not a real, existent thing. It lives instead in that dimension of human existence Charles Taylor called the “social imaginary,” and is just one of many things that situate me in the world in ways I don’t have to think about. This form of masculinity is all tangled up with how I know who I am and where I belong. It is as familiar as my sense of left or right, or up or down. It animates deep, visceral motivations and powerful emotional attachments that can exist in easy contradiction with my consciously held beliefs.

The aspiration to sovereign masculinity expresses itself most exuberantly in hyperbolic displays of power. Why are we still talking about Trump coming down the escalator and calling Mexicans rapists and murderers? Why are we still repeating his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Why do we keep reminding one another that he bragged about grabbing women by the “pussy ,” proclaiming “when you’re a star they let you do it”?