The thesis is that, as Dreyfuss points out in his article, opinions from the conservative side tend to be roundly dismissed by the left out of hand based almost exclusively on their own self-imposed filter. I think your response continues to do just that:

Conservatives think the climate change debate is more complicated than the mass media likes to portray it.

Conservatives did not think healthcare was fine before Obamacare, just better, and have been quite vocal about alternatives.

Actually most conservatives would not be ok with regulating all those things you bring up either so I’m not sure what your point is there. There is however plenty of discussion from the pro-gun side regarding gun control reform.

There have been plenty more comprehensive economic policy prescriptions than just lower taxes.

The problem is that I’m not really sure what you mean by compromise because most of the time when we hear this from the left it sounds like “compromise” is just going along with what you say and if we don’t then we’re angry and clinging to our guns and religion.

Meanwhile, the right has compromised on economic policy despite the drumbeat that they don’t.

The left seems to say either healthcare is now fine under obamacare despite plenty of evidence to the contrary or agree it needs to change without proposing any alternatives themselves.

I believe that the right would be open to gun control reform if it trusted the motives of progressives especially when what they propose wouldn’t have even stopped a single attack that they claim to want to prevent.

So really my thesis is that the debate can’t even start because the left and so-called “centrists” seem disingenuous from the start. Your comment was nearly as patronizing and dismissive as the ones I was trying to point out in my article. I believe many of the electorate on the left have the best of intentions, I just think they happen to be wrong. Meanwhile you seem to believe that the writers and thinkers of the right have nothing but 1 sentence slogans meant to be slobbered up by the unwashed masses. I think I’ve shown above that that’s not true. Some of the politicians may not feel that, but that’s why the political right has been so shaken up recently (while the left still seems to be politics as usual). Once we can accept that and be on equal footing then we can start having a conversation.