“Identity politics”—issues revolving around the degree to which majority groups should accommodate minority groups to respect individual or collective identities often relating to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or religion—has become center of political attention causing strong ideological disagreements across countries. Interestingly, a substantial number of identity politics disagreements relate to seemingly non-political issues like product names, packaging styles, choices of influencers to promote products etc. The name of a Danish ice cream, “Giant Eskimo”, and American food brand “Uncle Ben’s” use of a Black American butler on their packaging, both drew criticism with companies viewed as disrespectful or derogatory towards specific minority groups. Despite the high prevalence of these ideologically rooted disagreements, research has not yet illuminated the psychological explanations underlying such debates. Consequently, this project generates two competing theoretical accounts suggesting that identity politics disagreements may reflect i) preferences for group-based (in)equality (as measured by Social Dominance Orientation), or ii) traditionalism and conventionalism (as measured by Rightwing Authoritarianism). We pit the two accounts against each other in three well-powered studies with Danish (NStudy1=1100; NStudy2=2000) and American (NStudy3=2600) representative samples and measure attitudes towards salient identity politics issues related to ethnic, sexual and religious minority groups. Our results provide strong and robust support that ideological disagreements about identity politics are driven by individual differences in both i) preferences for group-based (in)equality, and ii) traditionalism and conventionalism, but with the latter explanation as the substantially stronger driver. We discuss the broader theoretical and practical implications of the results.