George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
This toxic ideology murdered 100 million people last century, let’s not go there.
In the US, unfortunately the people who are most against democracy are the ones with guns.
Later the allies again implemented a complete ban on weapon ownership until around 1950-1960.
1) The arms of the populace are enough to prevent the authoritarians from maintaining power. They're guaranteed to be inferior to, say, the country's military, but they can at least be a deterrent.
2) The populace agrees on who the authoritarians are and is organized against them.
Unfortunately, both are guaranteed to be missing in the US. The military is drastically more powerful and dangerous than even a million armed civilians, and the populace certainly doesn't agree on who the authoritarians are.
The most likely scenario for the end of US democracy is that a Democrat will win in 2024 and there will be a violent uprising from the right, just as there have been many practice runs and right-wing terrorist attacks in recent years.
Authoritarianism is successful when it can overwhelm and remove all opposition. That is very likely not the case in the US, conflicted as it may currently be (I am not from the US). But true that the largest weakness would probably be that the populace has different opinions about who should win here.