White House chief strategist Steve Bannon waiting for the arrival of US President Donald Trump for a meeting on cybersecurity in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on January 31. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images In a revealing interview, historian Neil Howe candidly discusses his perspective on Steve Bannon, the former head of the website Breitbart News who is now President Donald Trump's chief strategist.

Bannon is a proponent of the theory that history generally moves in 80-year cycles, with each cycle ending in a crisis that destroys the old order and ushers in something new. It’s an idea proposed by Howe in "The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny."

In widely reported remarks, Bannon believes the US has had three "turnings" — the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II — and is now in the midst of another emanating from the 2008 financial crisis.

In an exclusive interview with RiskHedge's Jonathan Roth, Howe said he knew Bannon and they had worked together on documentary film projects in the past. "I didn't find anything sort of out of the ordinary about him politically," Howe said. "Like most other Americans, I didn't know what alt-right was until I read about it in the media."

Howe portrays an interesting portrait of the man now advising Trump.

"I think the main thing people should understand about him, which I think maybe has not been portrayed in the media, is that he's not so much a policy person or a person with fervent policy or political beliefs — he's fundamentally a culture person," Howe said. "He has ascetic sensibilities. He's really interested in sort of how socially and culturally Trump's coalition hangs together.

"I do think that Steve Bannon, along with a few other people on sort of the conservative side of the spectrum, took an interesting lesson from 'The Fourth Turning' and that is our prediction that this era would see the successful merging of economic populism and cultural and social conservatism."

In the wide-ranging interview, Howe also detailed his own views about the possibility of civil war in America by discussing the mood in the US just before the Civil War in 1859: "Right up to the end, no one really realistically thought that actual war would happen. It just seemed incredible."

Listen to the full, informative interview with Howe here.