Obviously there are still going to be holdouts no matter what the issue, but by and large people have come to accept that seatbelts are inherently good and should be worn at all times when in a moving vehicle. It’s no longer a debate in the public discourse, there’s just people who wear seatbelts and people who make excuses for why they shouldn’t have to or don’t want to.

I see smoking in a similar light - it was a culture war that raged on for ages before finally the general zeitgeist came around to accepting the facts that the tobacco industry tried for so long to bury - smoking is bad for your health. Whether or not people chose to continue smoking or not is irrelevant, I just marvel at the fact that we actually won that culture issue. The good guys won, and justice prevailed.

I just can’t see us collectively coming together as a culture and agreeing on anything like that ever again. It’s not that those topics were not politicized - they were - but we now live in a post-truth society where if we were still trying to debate about seatbelts or cigarettes there would be no way to break through the stubborn political trenches people have dug themselves into.