In some respects, Rand's ideology of Objectivism can be seen as an over-reaction to the Marxist left. Rand lived through the Russian Revolution and experienced communism first hand. She despised the Marxian creed with every fiber of her being, and in her philosophy of Objectivism she sought to fashion a doctrine diametrically opposed to the collectivist and anti-capitalist dogmas of Soviet communism. Thus Rand wound up advocating a pure (some might say "extreme") form of individualism and capitalism as a way to oppose the murderous collectivism of Marxist-Leninism.
Rand began formulating these doctrines more than seventy years ago. The ideological landscape has undergone significant changes during this time. After the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archepelago, the Soviet version of Marxism became thoroughly discredited in the West, even among radical leftists. But the pathological urge to impose equity fairness on modern society has persisted among our civilizations' left-leaning discontents. To scratch the equity fairness itch, a new type of Marxism needed to be formulated. Thus was born Post-Modernism and Identity Politics, which replaced the class conflict paradigm of the old Marxism with a new paradigm based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. This constituted a real improvement over traditional Marxism in that it justified and nurtured a powerful political coalition between white progressives and non-whites. Demographic changes caused by declining birth rates among whites and increased immigration of non-whites will increase the chances that the left, and quite possibly the radical left, enjoys a permanent electoral majority in the United States in future decades.
