The historical precedents that sustained the remarkable commitment to mass anti-government demonstrations across Yemen for over a year starting in 2011 included the gross misconduct of political governance and practice of corruption that accompanied decades of mismanagement of the economy and the immiseration of the population. How Saleh, a virtual despot, was able to maintain his power for thirty-three years despite Yemen’s status as a democracy is principally signalled by the term ‘tribal republic.’ It represents the inseparability of the complex sociology of Yemen’s tribal structure, the political positioning of the military, and the forms of political manipulation intrinsic to the neopatrimonial system of authority he headed. After Saleh, General Ali Mohsin and Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar created a secret pact in 1978, the year Saleh became President, the tactics of orchestrating political chaos or ‘permanent crisis’ and exploiting state assets to accrue personal financial fortunes whilst maintaining a state of economic precarity for the Yemeni people became the norm. After exploring these features and conditions, the question of what pre-empted real revolution during Yemen’s Arab Spring is considered first by a more extensive examination of Bayat’s view of neoliberalism as it informed Yemen’s revolutionary endeavour and then through an analysis of the ‘deep state’ as the possible killer of radical transformation.