SOUTH CAROLINA’S highways are on their way to becoming a little safer, thanks to several important shifts in our state’s political culture. Either safer highways or the political changes alone would be cause for celebration. Together, they mark an astounding step forward for a state that too often allows itself to be dragged around by the nose by those on the political fringes.

The two-decade effort to meaningfully require drivers to wear seat belts culminated at midnight Wednesday when Gov. Mark Sanford allowed the so-called primary enforcement bill to become law without his signature.

Supporters, who ranged from police and emergency room physicians to insurance companies and, eventually, most voters and elected officials across the political spectrum, have spent those two decades stacking new study upon new study atop their pile of evidence that letting police enforce the seat belt law will increase use and save 50 to 80 lives a year.

In a state where the highway death rate consistently ranks in the top five nationally, and where dollars to build safer roads and put an adequate number of troopers on them have been sorely lacking, the wisdom of unshackling our understaffed police has long been obvious to all but the most dedicated opponents of the public’s right to demand that those who use public highways follow the public’s rules.

In the end, the only one standing in the way of this law was the governor, and he was swayed by the most obvious and irrefutable of arguments: It makes no sense to have a law but to prohibit police to enforce it.

As Mr. Sanford explained in a letter to the Senate: “This law in essence calls on police officers to enforce an existing law. That is consistent with the way we enforce all other laws in this state, and despite my personal reservations I see no compelling reason to prohibit police officers from requiring citizens to comply with existing law.”

This legislation shouldn’t mark an end to efforts to make our highways safer. Mr. Sanford argues that failure to use a seat belt should be part of your driving record, should be counted against your insurance record and should be admissible in court; we agree and will be happy to support an effort to make those changes. And we haven’t even seriously engaged the debate over motorcycle helmets and plugging loopholes in our DUI law; that needs to change.

But before we embark on those efforts, we should reflect on this milestone. As much as the seat belt law will do to save lives, its long-term impact may pale in comparison to the political developments that brought us to this point: Our governor was open-minded enough to acknowledge that logic trumped his disdain for what he calls government interference in personal choices. In the House, the sensible center rose up and rejected the paranoid predictions of the libertarian chorus. And in the Senate, the seat belt bill was both impetus for and the first successful test of a new set of rules that ended the tyranny of the (often tiny) minority, which had routinely blocked the overwhelming majority from bringing bills up for a vote.

Those are the ingredients for a government that can move our state forward in ways heretofore unimaginable.