So why the relative silence? Part of the reason is that campus activism is a left-wing phenomenon, making it awkward to target left-wing villains.

A larger reason is that, until a few years ago, the Venezuelan regime was a cause of the left, cheered by people like Naomi Klein, Sean Penn and Danny Glover. Left-wing publications such as Glenn Greenwald’s “The Intercept” have gone out of their way to make excuses for the regime and treat its critics as Washington stooges. Jeremy Corbyn, who could yet be Britain’s next prime minister, memorialized the late dictator Hugo Chávez in 2013 for his “massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”

Even today, the criticism is amazingly muted. If Klein has seriously come to terms with Maduro’s tyranny or Venezuela’s catastrophe, she has not done it in The Nation, The Guardian, or anywhere indexed by LexisNexis or Factiva. Corbyn’s response to Maduro’s repression has been to voice his condemnation of “the violence that’s been done by any side, by all sides” — a piece of obfuscatory equivalence worthy of Donald Trump’s Charlottesville remark. Penn and Glover seem to have moved on to other causes, like bashing Trump. Such courage.

That leaves the cause of Venezuela’s deliverance from evil in the hands of … Mike Pence. The vice president may not be the ideal spokesman for the rights of a Latin American country, at least in the eyes of the typical undergraduate political activist. And some of the Trump administration’s policy prescriptions, such as broad sanctions on the Venezuelan economy, may do more to tighten Maduro’s grip than to crush it. (More effective are U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan government officials, which target the guilty and spare the innocent.)

Still, it says something about the moral dereliction of too many liberals that Pence has been a clarion voice of attention and outrage at the unfolding catastrophe, while they mostly remain silent. When you’ve ceded the moral high ground to the Trump administration, you’ve ceded a piece of your soul.

It would be nice to suppose that Venezuela’s agonies will soon be at an end, on the theory that it can’t go on like this much longer. People said that about Syria several years ago, too. How many more Venezuelans have to starve or drown before Western liberals do something more than merely shake their heads?