as you say, the arrival of a bunch of new ones, plus refunding/remissioning of some existing.
The alliance of neocons with the religious right certainly supports your thinking. Neocons would always prefer to fight enemies than make friends, as someone said, and where better to find battles that must be joined than through religion?
As near as I have been able to tell, though, virtually no neocons were former liberals, which requires an open-mindedness and acceptance of the ideas of others, and specifically a relative lack of aggression for its own sake. Carter's, bless him, exemplified a liberal response to problems.
Most neocons were naturally farther left to begin with, the type of illiberal critics for whom intolerance and search for extreme answers are normal, who eventually moved militarily farther "left" so to speak to join with their right-wing ideological cousins, including the religious right. You can still see their origins in attitudes where they split with the hard right on social policy.
Some neocons perhaps would have started as conservatives, of course, as indicated by the tie you make to the sort of young conservatives who joined new, cooler organizational offshoots of their parents' hard-core John Birch Society, etc.
I'm hopeful that the political disasters threatening our nation are prompting more research into personality in politics, although it will tend to draw (still) attempts at repression. I used to think education was key above all, that it would save us, but that ignorance, at least, has been blasted.
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