I was thinking more in terms of conservative values like "My country is the best" and "Our enemies are bad people who hate our freedom", but your way makes a lot of sense too.

Although it's worth noting that all of what you say is obvious even to little kids are things no one had even thought of a hundred years ago. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring are remembered as iconic because they kick-started an environmentalist movement that just didn't really exist before the second half of the 20th century (although Thoureau and people like that get honorable mention). The idea of rich people paying to give poor sick people free medicine would have gotten you laughed out of most socially stratified civilizations on the wrong side of about 1850.

But I don't want to get too bogged down in which side is more contrarian, because it sounds too close to arguing whether liberalism or conservativism is better, which of course would be a terribly low status thing to do on a site like this :)

I think it was probably a mistake to include such large-scale politics on there at all. Whether a political position seems natural or contrarian depends on what social context someone's in, what age they are, and what the particular issue involved is.

What about this: moderately smart teenagers become extreme liberals to be contrary to the conservative ideals of their elders; excessively smart teenagers become extreme libertarians to be contrary to moderately smart teenagers and their elders, and older people become conservative (or moderate liberals) to signal they're not teenagers :)