Turkish democracy fell from grace. Not a long time ago, western circles celebrated Turkish president Tayyip Erdo?an’s moderate conservatism and pro-EU and pro-market direction as an antidote to Islamic fundamentalism and a role model for Islamic world. To the disappointment and shock of its admirers, in the later years of his tenure, the “new Turkey” took a sharp turn toward authoritarianism. Indeed, a single-party regime until 1946, Turkey has been a nominal democracy with mostly functioning democratic institutions with a history of populists-turn-authoritarians and recurring coup d’états. Some define it as “competitive authoritarianism,” others call it “electoral tyranny.” Though of significant value, recent approaches mostly fail to account for two aspects of the hotbed of Turkish authoritarianism. Thus, I have two interrelated claims. First, this was, in a sense, neither a “sharp turn,” a “drift,” nor an “exit” from or an aberration of the Turkish democracy when, at least, situated into the broader Turkish history. On the contrary, it reveals an innate feature of the Republic, the history of which oscillates between coup d’états and the civil rule of populist parties closely monitored by the military. An incessant state of exception underlies modern Turkish political life in one authoritarian continuum between the Kemalists and the Islamists; hence, it is a story of two authoritarianisms. Second claim is concerned with the role of the masses. Except for the times of episodic, bottom-up mobilizations, the “masses” have almost always been rendered an auxiliary power either in the Kemalist era or under Islamist rule. Depending on the ideological lenses of the ruling elite of the time (either Kemalists or Islamists), they were treated either as a pool of electoral clients during times of ‘normalcy,’ or a ready-made force to mobilize against fellow citizens during times of legitimacy crisis. Therefore, I claim that against this authoritarian background, the history of mass action in Turkey can be read as characterized by a pendulum between mass violence and rarely, episodic mass mobilization. These two phenomena are integrated by an inherent authoritarianism of the Turkish state structure.