Politics & Power Quote by John Raleigh Mott

Mott is pitching upheaval as both diagnosis and sales copy: the old world is “broken up,” so the only honest posture is to admit the rubble and start drafting blueprints. Writing in the early 20th-century churn of war, revolution, and mass politics, he names two forces that terrified liberal internationalists in equal measure: “extreme nationalism” (the tribal fever that turned borders into battle lines) and “Bolshevism” (the revolutionary promise that threatened to reorder property, class, and faith). Pairing them is strategic. He isn’t offering a partisan map; he’s warning that the old moral and institutional architecture is collapsing from both the right and the left.

The line “It is literally true that old things are passing away” borrows the cadence of scripture, but it’s not piety for its own sake. It’s an attempt to baptize modern crisis into a providential narrative: catastrophe as an opening, not an end. That’s why the sentence pivots hard on “granted.” Renewal is conditional. History doesn’t automatically improve; it can just as easily harden into authoritarianism or chaos. The future depends on “wise, unselfish, and determined guides,” a phrase that telegraphs the era’s confidence in elite stewardship and moral leadership.

Subtext: Mott is making a bid for legitimacy for the kind of transnational, faith-inflected leadership he represented. If the world is being remade, then the real contest is over who gets to be the “guides” - and what values will quietly set the terms of the new order.