She was created in the cauldron of the Russian Revolution, that huge mass of injustice and hate and greed and destruction that the victors decided to make all nice and clean and good.
She's part Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. The atheism, resulting in her view of theodicy. The absolute confidence that she and only she understands what's right. The complete indifference to the plight of millions. Let them die, she says, because they don't matter--they're not the blessed of society.
But she rejected parts of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. The blessed and deserving aren't the poor by virtue of being poor; government should not be deciding the victors and losers based upon the political views of a few men in power or how they can bribe or flatter a majority. Rights aren't bestowed and rights aren't collective--so that justice is individual and deserved. She learned the lesson of the NEP all too well: If everybody's the same, why did the economy collapse? Stalin's after-the-fact rehash was wrong. The NEP showed that the bourgeois had skills, but the state decided just to use those people and, when it was done using people, it disposed of them. In a way that makes anything that corporations have done seem petty or even kind.
The key thing she rejected, though, was the emphasis put on the state. If you put all power in the government, in the state, then the individual is shit. This had a bit of a Sartrean "nausee" quality about it. She so totally rejected the state-as-all that she was left with the individual-as-all.
Pretty much everything else about Rand is corollary. Her logic and assumptions drive her to untenable positions; she is forced by the power of the trauma-induced convictions to adopt certain views that render her almost a sociopath. (Then again, consider Lenin and Stalin.)
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