Is there a recurring underlying cultural logic that continually frames Turkish social and political life regardless of the labels attached to the divisive issues of the particular period, like left-right in the 1970s and secularist-Islamist today? Turkey is not the only country exhibiting inter-group hostility, of course, but it appears to be an extreme case in which such sociocultural patterns con¬sistently undermine attempts at cooperation and unity. As such, it is an important test case for understanding the dynamics of political and social fragmentation and the emergence of inter-group violence. My research approaches these questions by focusing on central themes, like hostile group formation, authoritarian hierarchy and key cultural concepts of hero and traitor. These themes emerged from an oral history of the 1970s in Turkey, open-ended interviews with a wide variety of individuals who directly and personally experienced this period, set within a scaffolding of factual reports and secondary literature in Turkish and English about this period and two decades of ethnographic study of contemporary Turkish political life. I will suggest a model of factionalism, which I call spindle autocracy, in which I suggest that hierarchies that characterize Turkish political life are brittle because they are grounded in loyalty and obedience to a single central leader (the spindle around which raw recruits become networked, much as raw wool twines into yarn), rather than to the organization itself, its ideology, rules and procedures, or merit as a marker for leadership and promotion. Disagreements with the hero/leader thus become personal betrayals that require the "traitors" to leave the group, taking their networks with them and later reforming around new leaders in a continual process of fracturing into mutually hostile groups. These dynamics scale up into national polarization and violence punctuated by attempts at consolidation, for instance, through nationalist reformulations, constitutional and educational revisions, and rallies. The study crosses disciplinary boundaries, using insights from social anthropology as well as political science and psychology.