The Industrial Revolution appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as a subject in its own right but as a causal backdrop that guests invoke when arguing about immigration, national cohesion, socialism, and the cultural aftermath of the First World War. Across the excerpts, no guest sets out to define the Industrial Revolution, date it precisely, or assess it as a historical episode; instead it functions as a shared reference point whose economic and social effects are treated as established. The result is a set of overlapping but distinct claims: that industrialization in the United States drew immigrants from Europe, that the countries where it occurred were unusually cohesive, that it uprooted European populations into cities and thereby created a working class, and that the mechanization it represented lost its moral prestige in the slaughter of 1918.
Immigration and the pull of American industry
Alex Nowrasteh, in a December 2015 episode on immigration, gives the most developed account of the Industrial Revolution in the excerpts. Responding to Bob Zadek’s question about a correlation between economic growth and immigration, Nowrasteh says there is “a big correlation” and goes further, describing “a causation that runs initially in one direction.” In his telling, economic growth in the United States came first: the Industrial Revolution “has taken off here in the mid-1800s,” and as a result there was “a sort of increasing stream of immigrants from Europe, from places like Germany and Ireland.” He notes that Ireland is “a little different” because many Irish came fleeing a famine, but describes a steady stream increasing from across Europe “to feed the Industrial Revolution,” alongside people moving to the frontiers. He names specific settlement patterns: Nordic immigrants settling Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas; Germans going into Missouri and the Midwest; and a lot of Irish going to East Coast cities. Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015)
Nowrasteh then traces a change beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, when many Chinese immigrants arrived, working on the railroads and in mining out West and diversifying into agriculture and services in San Francisco. He says this led to some of the first national anti-immigration laws, “such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which became law in 1882,” which he says excluded all Chinese immigrants from the United States. He connects that law to a shift in European immigration from Northern and Western Europe toward the South and East—Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans including Poles and Russians, with a heavy percentage of Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. By 1920, he says, immigration was dominated by Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews and other groups from Southern and Eastern Europe, and Congress passed laws in the 1920s restricting immigration and specifically discriminating against those from Eastern and Southern Europe. Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015)
Bob Zadek frames the same discussion with his own historical claims, telling Nowrasteh that the country had “totally open borders till around the 1880s,” that there was “incredible growth” until then, and that “there’s no dispute the growth was directly related to immigration.” He also rejects the idea that anyone owns his or her job, arguing that Americans who shy away from competition are being un-American given that the country “was founded on a capitalist competitive system.” These are Bob’s framings, not Nowrasteh’s. Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015)
National cohesion and the countries where it happened
In a December 2018 episode, Yoram Hazony invokes the Industrial Revolution in the course of an argument about immigration and national cohesion. Hazony tells Bob Zadek that the benefits of diversity are real but hold “only true up until a certain point,” beyond which diversity creates tension that can become violent. He says domestically quiet countries tend to be ones with “one very dominant culture” rather than homogeneous ones, since no such countries exist. Among the examples he gives—England, France, and the United States—he says these are the countries people point to as those “where freedom was at its most successful,” where people would most want to live, “where the Industrial Revolution took place,” and which are most advanced in science and ideas. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Hazony’s use of the Industrial Revolution here is as a marker of a broader achievement he attributes to internally cohesive societies. He argues those countries were for centuries cohesive to a very large degree, with populations that were mutually loyal, so that government action did not immediately produce civil strife or civil war—though he concedes there were some civil wars. He says the United States succeeded as an immigrant country through “a kind of back and forth of allowing foreign immigration and then toning them down,” and that it has never surpassed its current level of immigration, with 15% of the population foreign-born. He warns that a country cannot be brought to 30% or 50% immigrants without falling apart, and that immigration “cannot be dealt with as though it’s an absolute.” Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Socialism, urbanization, and the working class
Joshua Muravchik, in an April 2019 episode, places the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century and treats it as the engine of a demographic transformation that socialism exploited. He tells Bob Zadek that “the world was changing in the second half of the 19th century with what’s called the Industrial Revolution,” and that there was “a huge migration of people all over Europe, not from one country to another so much, but from the countryside into the cities.” The world, he says, “was becoming industrialized and urbanized.” Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
From that, Muravchik draws a political consequence: socialists of the generation after Marx and Engels took from Marxism the idea that “the natural constituency for socialism was the working class,” and the socialist parties devoted themselves to winning over workers while other parties did not. He calls this “a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which socialist parties won a lot of support among workers because they were the ones paying attention to them.” Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
The same episode has Bob Zadek offering his own account of socialism’s promises. He argues that socialism “offers the promise of heaven” but is “incapable of delivering,” and that there is no “economic FDA” or “economic SEC” to protect Americans from “unsafe and ineffective economic policies.” He names the Democratic Socialists of America, AOC, and Bernie Sanders as offering what he calls a bill of goods. Muravchik, for his part, describes Marx’s vision that under socialism everyone would do what fulfilled them—hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, writing literary criticism in the evening—and Trotsky’s claim that every human being would have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. He also says Marx and Engels began as two men who hated religion and hit upon communism as the real solution to the problems they were interested in, and that Engels reviewed Das Kapital ten or twelve times under different pseudonyms. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
The machine era and the First World War
In an August 2020 episode on the 1918 pandemic, Ron Jones treats the Industrial Revolution as a cultural reference point whose prestige collapsed under the weight of the war. Speaking with Charlie Deist, Jones says the First World War was “an awful, awful thing to witness,” with so many people dying, and that there was “a disillusionment with technology.” He says: “We used technology to just kill more people. So we were coming out of the Industrial Revolution where just, you know, the machine era, right? We were holding up the machine as the Holy Grail, and look what it did.” He suggests this had an effect on how people felt and how their physiology functioned, and that this was specifically addressed in some cities during the 1918-1919 pandemic. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Jones’s broader discussion concerns masking and public health strategy. He says San Francisco had a heavy emphasis on masking and that at the time “it was considered patriotic to wear the mask,” with a whole patriotic campaign for masking. He also says health and community leaders in some cities talked about the fear response as it related to the immune system, and that a 2006 pandemic workshop hosted by the CDC and the Health and Human Services Department emphasized clear and truthful communication and not feeding the fear factor. He notes that some cities left certain avenues of entertainment open because of concern over a lack of a place to vent stress from the pandemic and the war. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Across episodes
Four episodes touch the Industrial Revolution, and the excerpts show no development in how it is treated: each guest uses it as background for a different argument—Nowrasteh for immigration as a response to American growth, Hazony for the cohesion of the countries where it occurred, Muravchik for European urbanization and the socialist appeal to workers, and Jones for the discredited machine era after the First World War—with no guest responding to another’s characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define the Industrial Revolution, give it a start or end date, or identify its technological or institutional causes. They do not say where it began, how long it lasted, or what its measured effects on wages, population, or output were. No excerpt states a bill number, a case holding, or a constitutional provision in connection with it, and the excerpts contain no sustained disagreement among the guests about what the Industrial Revolution was.