During the 1980s, the conservative right had a number of significant ideological victories - one of which was embedding the ideas broadly associated with "fiscal conservatism" into how people think about governance and public spending.

Some of the strongest evidence for this is the resounding liberal preference since for means-testing over universality, which is really just the core ideas of "fiscal conservatism" expressed in the language of liberal conscientiousness

In the 1980s the right successfully reinvigorated the language of the deserving and the underserving poor and redefined huge swaths of public spending as subsidized waste. The liberal embrace of means-testing represents the internalization of key precepts of this philosophy.

That you now hear liberals resisting basic social democratic ideas with simplistic bromides like "why should we pay for rich kids to go to school?" even when a progressive tax system nullifies the argument on its own terms shows the extent of what the right achieved in the 1980s

Further to this, the right managed to redefine social goods as commodities to be bought and sold like everything else. The same logic is now applied by many American liberals to human needs like healthcare

Just look at how centrist Dems conceive of healthcare: as a marketplace full of consumers wherein the horizons of policy stop at making the market work better, improving "access", and allowing people to shop for insurance more easily