The wave of contentious revolts that struck the Arab world during the winter of 2011 shared one thing in common: the largest anti-state protests occurred within republican states, while monarchies were able to contain their opposition. Yet monarchies like Jordan and Bahrain are no different than Tunisia, Egypt, or Algeria in having bulging youth populations, uncompetitive economic systems, and closed autocratic regimes. They are equally repressive. What, then, accounts for their effectiveness? This paper suggests that Middle Eastern monarchies enjoy an institutional advantage that simply makes life hard for viable opposition. They combine reservoirs of mythologized traditions with modern constitutional prerogatives, creating institutionalized buffers that immunize royal palaces from all but two rare threats: cross-class revolutionary movements and well-organized military coups. Thus, while the 1950s through 1970s saw the destruction of four MENA dynasties at the hands of army conspiracies and revolutionary vanguards—Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Libya (1969), and Iran (1979)—the lack of further royal deposals in the past three decades suggests that the remaining monarchies have converged upon a common strategy of adaptation. In Middle Eastern monarchical states today, ruling families sit atop the political system, occupying an institutional apex that lies beyond electoral and judicial contestation. Granted absolutist imperatives by Western imperialism, but carefully building instead mythologized narratives of historical legitimation, these royal houses can only be constrained through fundamental constitutional discussion. In closed monarchical dictatorships, namely Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, there are almost no legal means by which non-royal elites can advocate constitutional reforms. In the liberalized monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait, constitutional discourse remains institutionally separated from everyday opposition issues in the plural spaces linking state with society, from formal organizations like parliaments and councils to more informal venues like the press and civil society. When opposition elites do manage to broach this issue, royalists can exploit their symbolic power to deepen support among rural social forces and trigger new political conflicts. Alternatively, they may deploy juridical power to constrain (e.g., repress) or expand (e.g., liberalize) those institutional arenas, thereby again shifting debate from their prerogatives. In this ecology, only two kinds of opposition credibly threaten royal power: cross-class revolutionary movements from below, which are rare, and praetorian machinations from the army, which have not occurred since the 1960s.