When mass protest movements for democratic reform fail to deliver timely and substantive change, they are often labeled as failures by observers and participants alike. But this conclusion misses important ways in which such protest movements may nonetheless alter dynamics of contention and, in the long run, increase the politicization and lower the thresholds of mobilization of ordinary citizens (Lynch 2014). Scholars of the former USSR note that pro-democracy protests brutally repressed under communism helped pave the way for subsequent mobilization (e.g. Kozlov, Fitzpatrick, and Miranenko 2011). More recently, Berman has demonstrated how failed revolutions increase elite threat perceptions and drive greater concessions to protesters (2020). As the MENA region marks 10 years since the 2011 uprisings, efforts to better understand their legacy provide a necessary corrective to those who believe that the region’s authoritarian incumbents have successfully demobilized their critics and stabilized their rule. In this paper, part of a larger project on the dynamics of contention in contemporary Morocco, I explore the long-run impact of 2011’s February 20th Movement, illustrating that the movement’s splintering, and the regime’s failure to deliver promised reforms, have nonetheless heightened levels of politicization and given rise to novel forms of contention among ordinary Moroccans. This is in part, I argue, because of the regime’s long history of over-promising and under-delivering, which has increased ordinary citizens’ expectations while giving them an anodyne, apolitical language with which to make claims against the state—and even seek accountability from those at the top. The concessions granted to the February 20th Movement in 2011 were only the latest in this series of disingenuous reform efforts, and the emergence of novel forms of contention and indeed protest suggest that there may be a limit to the “power of empty promises” (Distelhorst 2017). These conclusions are supported by extensive documentary and interview evidence collected over the course of nearly 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco. Specifically, this paper combines evidence from open-ended interviews with Moroccan activists, journalists, politicians, and academics, as well as analysis of local elite and popular media, to provide an account of increasing politicization and contention in Morocco in the years since 2011’s February 20th Movement.