The contentious revolts comprising the Arab Spring have followed a curious pattern: they have predominantly upended republican autocracies while largely leaving the region’s authoritarian kingdoms intact. While Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and soon Syria experience the tumult of regime change caused by opposition uprisings, the eight monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the five Gulf principalities meander on. Why? What accounts for the apparent resilience of Arab monarchies? Most studies suggest that these eight kingships today simply tend to repress less than their republican counterparts, relying instead on cultural affinities or institutional mechanisms of demobilization. Yet this begs the deeper question of why monarchies embrace cooptation over coercion in the first place. Combining cross-national fieldwork with cross-time analysis, this study provides a simple but innovative reason why Middle East monarchies today have been less likely to liquidate opposition in mass episodes than presidential rulers: they learned from their predecessors, namely the 40-some dynastic rulerships that control sovereign territory that collapsed in the region from the early 20th century through the 1970s, that coalition-building rather than coercive violence was a better strategy for survival. Whereas republican autocracies come in three varieties—militaristic, personalistic, and single-party—the principle of hereditary succession within monarchism generates a collective sense of membership among geographically proximate royal families today, including an increased propensity to learn why past brethren fell to mass uprisings, such as Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), and Iran (1979). Cross-national studies miss this cognitive mechanism in favor of cultural or institutional reasoning, because they do not analyze the far more numerous monarchies in the past which have fallen. When categorized into a qualitative dataset, monarchism does not appear as a durable regime type in temporal perspective: it has suffered an 80% failure rate over the past century. Moreover, whereas an equal number of republics have suffered regime transition after using either indiscriminate violence or co-opting tactics, the vast majority of fallen monarchies fell into a single category—they deployed large-scale brutality against popular uprisings, which triggered self-sustaining cycles of social mobilization and elite defections. Herein lays the final point. Over time, as more monarchies collapsed, those that endured have phased out violent responses to opposition and instead preferred coalitional strategies of co-optation. More than coincidence, I conclude that this historical pattern exposes a learning pattern that convinces royal dictators to keep most soldiers in the barracks when popular rebellions emerge from below.