I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition. Though you could even argue that Bush II was a continuation of the same. You can cherry-pick dates if you like, but even in that cherry-picked 24 year range Democrats controlled the senate 18-6 and the house 24-0 and the Democrats had unified control of congress and the presidency for 4 years to 0 for the Republicans. The Democratic party was dominant in US politics from 1932 to 1992 and that is not really arguable. The modern US administrative state was build by primarily liberal Democrats with plenty of cooperation from moderate Republicans (who don't really exist anymore) and with opposition from segregationist southern Democrats (who also don't exist anymore). You can argue that they did a good job (and I would argue that for a lot of it they did), but you can't claim that they didn't do it and that they aren't the political establishment of the modern America state.

> Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class,

Yeah, maybe in 1960 when 8% of Americans had a degree, but not today when 40% do: https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics

A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common. It can't be both. As a society we have resolved this contradiction by making a tiered system where people nominally have the same degree, but actually only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count. And somehow the low status degrees cost almost as much as the high status ones even though they have a fraction of the value. But apparently a lot of people didn't get the memo and still think their low status degree is a ticket to a high status job.

> but degrees were available to those who could get them

So you are saying that degrees are less available now even though the number of people who have them has gone up 5x since 1960? Citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.

> Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into.

So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class? Again, citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.