Because pendulum swings like those are, in reality, just trading one kind of extreme authoritarianism for another.
My oldest brother started out in high school as a member of The Newman Club, circa 1962.
The Newman Club was a very strict conservative Catholic fellowship.
Three years later he's at American University in DC, a supporter of The Weather Underground as well as being a registered member of the Socialist Workers Party.
Then later, at the University of Maryland (he got flunked out of AU - ZERO attendance at classes) he became a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. (SDS) Fast forward ten years and suddenly he's "been saved" and he's a raging far Right guy listening to AM hate radio and by the time Obama got elected he's talking about how it's time for a coup d'etat and about "how important our militias are."
No, not the official state militias...
OUR militias? I didn't donate to them, I am not a member of them, I don't support their views and I didn't vote for them, and besides, they would probably shoot me as much as look at me, so how the Hell are they OUR militias? That's all I wanna know...but that's my brother for you.
I still love the guy but when it comes to politics, he's a kook, an Alex Jones listening, Jade Helm believing conspiracy nutter.
So...there's a living breathing example of the pendulum swing. And right alongside my brother were equally radical ultra-Lefties of his time period, like Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Joshua Muravchik, pretty much most if not all of the old neocon core that served Bush 43. Most of them started out as starry-eyed foaming at the mouth chic campus lefty radicals, and they left that un-reality and traded it for an alternate un-reality.
They took their leftist fanaticism with them but along the way they clicked off all the righty-tighty boxes and just used the old Alinskyite agitprop tricks they learned as lefties and applied them to their new cause.
Indeed, plenty of dyed in the wool born and raised traditional conservatives (ones who never meddled with leftism in their youth) arched their eyebrows at their almost "Wilsonian" eagerness for interventionism on a global scale.
And Wolfowitz and Bolton slapped together the working prototype: Iraq.
Never mind that "neo-conservative" is a contradiction in terms. A thing cannot be "neo" AND "conservative" at the same time.
It is etymologically, linguistically and metaphorically impossible, like Orwellian Doublethink.
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