In his victory speech, Emmanuel Macron, who won the first round of the French presidential elections, said: "I want to become... the president of the patriots in the face of the threat from the nationalists." The distinction would be lost on most Trump supporters in the United States of America and on the 'Little Englanders' who voted for Brexit in Britain, but it's absolutely clear to the French, and indeed to most Europeans.

In the US, the preferred word is 'patriot', but it usually just means 'nationalist', with flags flaunted and slogans chanted. "America First" says Donald Trump, and the crowd replies "USA all the way!" You can't imagine a British election rally doing that - the United Kingdom is too close to mainland Europe where that sort of thing ended very badly - but the English nationalism behind Brexit was painfully obvious. For some in both countries, it's actually 'white nationalism', but even the many non-racists who voted for Trump or for Brexit draw the line at the border or the water's edge. There's 'us', and on the far side there's 'them'.

Whereas the French men and women who voted for Macron understand the difference between patriotism and nationalism very well. They will have to vote for Macron again in the run-off election on May 7, when his opponent will be the neo-fascist candidate, Marine Le Pen, but in that round they will be joined by almost all the people who voted for other presidential candidates in the first round. She is a nationalist; they are patriots.

In Europe, nationalism is linked in the collective memory with the catastrophe of the last century's great wars, and the racism that is often associated with it triggers images of Nazi extermination camps. Not all Europeans are immune to that kind of nationalism or political phenomena like Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Beppo Grillo in Italy could not exist, but they remain a minority almost everywhere.

That was not obvious four months ago. After the Brexit vote and Trump's election, Europe's ultra-nationalists were convinced that their moment had finally come. Brexit seemed like the first step towards the break-up of the European Union, and from the Netherlands to Austria it felt like the fascists were at the door.

Not so. Wilders's party gained only a few seats in the Dutch election and remains very much a minority taste. Marine Le Pen is no closer to the French presidency than her openly fascist father was 15 years ago: the National Front vote never breaks through the 25 per cent ceiling. And the hard-right, anti-immigrant, anti-EU Alternative for Germany party has lost its leader and one-third of its popular support.

The 'populist wave' that seemed to be sweeping through Western politics turns out to be merely a storm in the much smaller teacup known as the 'Anglosphere'. It's only known this way to Europeans, who use the word, often tinged with contempt, to describe the deregulated economies and market-obsessed politics of the post-Reagan US and the post-Thatcher UK. The politics of the Anglosphere has been consistently subservient to 'the market' even when purportedly left-wing leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were in power. The result has been somewhat higher economic growth rates, and a rapidly widening gulf between the incomes of the rich and the rest.

The rest of the West has not been immune to this political fashion, but it has been far less prominent in the countries of the European Union. Now the disparity in incomes between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent has grown so great in the heartlands of the Anglosphere that the political chickens are coming home to roost.

The response in both the US and the UK is not real populism but standard right-wing politics in a populist style, using nationalism to distract the victims from the fact that these governments actually serve the rich.