Was Snape a Bully?

 Jesus loves the bullies, too. He wants us all to be happy, including the bullies.
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⁠(I'm sure I've just stepped on some toes there, and will now get a lot of pushback, especially from people who think bullies need no defense.)
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⁠But Snape is not really a bully.

Bullies believe that power is the foundation of human relationships. Snape sometimes seemed to behave that way, but he kept breaking the rules of power.
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⁠He does teach us a lot about bullying and that makes his character especially poignant because our modern culture has developed a very two-dimensional view of bullies (two -dimensional view of personality in general, but especially of bullies).
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⁠Teasing and bullying are the bully's way of reaching out to others, of inviting them to play. They have been raised to believe that any other sort of human interaction is weak, to the point that they don't dare interact in any other way. So it's hard for them to learn any healthier way.
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⁠Then we, the rest of society, paint them as bullies, ostracize them, and refuse to give them any opportunity to learn any other way. We have to protect ourselves, we say. That makes it doubly hard for them to learn any healthier way.
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⁠James was not a bully, but he didn't know how to deal with Snape. So he dropped back to power-based forms -- which is the essential form of relationship that bullies know. That doesn't make James a bully any more than Snape.
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⁠Snape was just a lonely kid who wanted friends but was not allowed them. Society ostracized him and tried to force him to act the bully. Tom Riddle definitely encouraged him to become a bully.
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⁠Snape had difficulty relating to people in other ways than the forms of power, but he did try to give the children of Slytherin the things he had not had. He used pecking orders when it was necessary -- because the kids that got selected into Slytherin tended to know nothing else themselves -- but he also tried to give them other ways to interact.

Much is made of how he treated Harry. I'm going from what I've known of bullies who have tried to teach me how to be a bully "for my own good" here. I can tell you that Snape did not try to teach Harry how to be a bully. He (successfully) taught him how to defend himself from bullies, and how to choose a different way.

(I guess I have to state the obvious somewhere in here: bullies can never be happy as long as they believe that power is the only way to relate with people -- as long as they insist on being bullies. God does not want bullies to remain bullies.)
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⁠Ostracism is itself a form of bullying. Think about that while you think about how you hate Snape.
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