More so than anyone else, it is those on the political left actively promoting the fiction that “bullying” is both something new as well as a social problem—that is, the type of problem for which government alone can supply “the solution.”

My sympathy for the victims of bullies is as unqualified as is my contempt for their tormentors.  However, no discussion of this issue can afford to neglect the following facts.

First, what we today refer to as “bullying” is scarcely a recent phenomenon.  For as long as there have been human beings there have been bullies.

Second, not only is there nothing distinctive, much less unique, about our generation as far as bullying is concerned.  For as hurtful, nasty, and destructive as they undoubtedly are, today’s bullies can hardly be said to be as savage and merciless as the “bullies” of those times and places of centuries and millennia past.

Simply put, while the world remains broken, it was a much uglier place in the past when, for example, it wasn’t at all uncommon for people to diligently guard themselves and their families at every moment of every day against being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

Third, literally speaking, there is no more a “solution” to bullying than there is a solution to lust.  And a government-imposed “solution” to the former is surely bound to be as abject a failure as a similar “solution” promises to be for the latter.

The ideal “solution” to bullying consists in victims standing up to bullies.

Finally, it is more than a little ironic that the biggest bullies of them all are those who presume to lecture the rest of us on bullying.  For all of the rhetoric enlisted in the service of advancing it, the left’s agenda is an agenda of bullying.

After all, what is bullying but an activity by which the bully attempts to intimidate others for the sake of coercing them into doing his will.  To the extent that the leftist’s program requires ever greater concentrations of government power, i.e., government force, for its execution, the leftist differs from your run of the mill bully only inasmuch as he has far more opportunities to wreak havoc.  But the leftist is also a bully par excellence inasmuch as he spares no occasion to assassinate the characters of his opponents—you know, those who wish not to be coerced into parting with their legally acquired resources in order to subsidize someone else’s ideas of what is “really” best for them.

If those on the left are genuinely concerned about abating bullying, they need to start by removing the boulder in their own collective eye.

They can do something about bullying, in other words, by abandoning their leftism.