nm; hijack
A lot of the hypocrisy you see on both sides have to do with conflicts of primary motivation. For example, the Republicans spent decades in the cold war fighting for bigger military budgets and opposing the various one-sided ‘peace’ movements that were typically supported by many Democrats. That created a conflict within the Republican party between large military budgets and their desire to curb spending. Likewise, the Republicans have always been blind to farm subsidies, even though there’s nothing conservative about using government to prop up industry. Unfortunately, farmers are generally Republican and their votes are needed, so…
As for the Democrats, the biggest example is education. The teacher’s unions are a huge force in Democratic politics. So much so that the Democratic National Convention could almost be mistaken for a teacher’s convention. Democrats are supposed to also care about the education of children, and especially minority children, and the public school system in the inner cities where these children live is failing them badly. The teacher’s unions don’t want real reform, so the Democrats are forced to adopt ‘reform’ policies that generally involve improvements for teachers, and not the kids. The teacher’s unions are the Democrat’s version of the Republican ‘farmer’ constituency.
This conflict on the left also arises between their support for minorities and immigrants on one hand, and their support for powerful unions on the other. The Davis-Bacon act was promoted as a pro union measure, but was actually enacted to stop non-union minority workers from undercutting the much larger wages of the largely white union membership of the time.
This last conflict was partly responsible for Trump’s victory. He reclaimed a lot of ‘Reagan Democrats’ who are blue-collar workers and often unionized. He managed to do this because the Democrats resolved their conflict between support for labor and immigration by focusing on large public unions, immigrants, and identity politics, and basically thumbing their nose at a large part of their old constituency in places like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, etc. So the resolution of this bit of hypocrisy may have cost them the White House.
I’m not sure farm subsidies are necessarily an anti-conservative policy. They’re an anti-competitive policy, but both parties have been protectionist at times and there’s something to be said in national security terms for maintaining an ability to feed the nation independently. The same is true of defense spending, to an extent (though obviously not the extent to which the US spends on defense).
American conservatives have never been opposed to intervention or to ballooning military budgets as a group. An interventionist foreign policy is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed on since WWI; their disputes are over when and how to intervene, not whether.