A great example would be views on race.

No, public opinion about blacks in the United States has not swung back and forth to any significant extent since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. It has consistently improved since the 1950s, with only a few minor drops.

American opinion on race over time has been pretty crazy, from the deterministic views of race makes you inferior nonsense (based on racial determinism) used to justify slavery; to the pretty normative fact based view of race really doesn't mean anything other than who you are related too view championed by civil rights; to the current wave of SJW nonsense of race means everything only white people are racist and don't understand view (it's based more on critical theory than fact).

Those movements are decades apart from one another, though. This isn't accurately described as "wiggling from extreme to extreme" unless that just means that public opinion can change. What you suggested originally was that there were "drastic swings in the short term," and the data do not show that in the case of blacks.

I need to look into your other examples further. Initially it seems like they may have similar problems, since they deal with opinion changes over long periods of time, in response to concrete events, rather than with drastic shifts over a short period of time.